


Anything different is good

by modern_leper



Category: Superstore (TV)
Genre: F/M, Groundhog Day, Just going to pretend that Kelly doesn't exist, Time Loop, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-07-04 11:01:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15839892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modern_leper/pseuds/modern_leper
Summary: Amy is stuck in her own version of Groundhog Day. Luckily Jonah owns it on DVD.





	1. Day 9

**Author's Note:**

> As is appropriate with any time loop story, I'm starting in the middle.

“Rock Lobster,” Amy announced, dropping into the vacant seat next to Jonah.

 

He looked up from the string cheese he'd been peeling. “Excuse me?”

 

“Rock Lobster is going to be the next song that plays,” she replied, pointing up to the speaker above them. Sure enough, the opening bass notes began to blare out of Cloud 9 corporate radio station that ran throughout the store and, despite numerous complaints and pleas for peace and quiet, the employee break room as well.

 

“Huh,” Jonah nodded appreciatively. “Neat trick.”

 

“Not a trick. I knew it was going to be the next song.”

 

Jonah’s brows quirked up with interest. “And how'd you know that? Is it on a loop or something?”

 

“The same way I know that Dina is about to come in here complaining about how bad her pregnancy heartburn is.”

 

“How-,” his question was cut off by the sound of Dinah groaning as she entered the room and poured herself a cup of water from the cooler.

 

“Glenn's kid is going to burn my esophagus straight out of me, I swear to God.”

 

Jonah spun back to face Amy, a smirk on her face that anyone would recognize as being synonymous with the words _I told you so_.

 

“She's complained about that every day this week," he countered.

 

Amy held up a finger to silence him. Before he could protest, she opened her mouth. No sound came out, but her lips perfectly synced with Dina’s words, coming from the other side of the room.

 

“I could probably digest an aluminum can right now, the stomach acid would eat straight through it.”

 

Jonah looked back and forth from Amy to Dina, his mouth opening and closing as his mind cycled through a list of immediate questions, unable to settle on one.

 

“That was…you...how...you're fucking with me right?” That seemed to be the only explanation his brain felt comfortable accepting.

 

Amy sighed and her shoulders slumped. “I wish,” she replied. Jonah was almost disappointed to hear the sincerity in her voice.

 

“Then how did you know what Dina was about to say? And what song was next?”

 

“Because that's what she always says today.”

 

“I don't think that sentence made as much sense as you think it did.”

 

“I know,” she said, sounding resigned. “But I meant what I said. On Tuesday, October 24th at 11:01 AM, Steal My Sunshine by Len fades out and Rock Lobster by the B52s fades in. At 11:02, Dina comes into the break room and complains about her heartburn. In about,” she glanced down at her watch, “thirty seconds Mateo is going to come in limping on his right side. He's going to get annoyed when nobody asks him what happened, but it's Mateo so he's going to be, like, really passive aggressive about it. Watch.” She pointed to the door.

 

A few seconds later, Mateo came through the door and made his way over to his locker, a pronounced limp slowing his progress. A few people glanced up at him from their phones, but no one greeted him or asked about his apparent injury. He shoved his backpack into a locker, and sighed loudly for the whole room to hear. He looked around pointedly and, finding no one to meet his gaze, sat down at the closest table and dramatically heaved his leg up on to a chair to elevate it. And then he sighed, again.

 

“Heavy on the passive, light on the aggressive,” Jonah muttered to himself. He turned back to Amy. “Okay, I'll bite. What the hell is going on?”

 

She shook her head. “Not here. Follow me.”

 

He marched behind her down the back hall and out to the loading dock. It was a decent place for a private conversation, as it stayed relatively abandoned between morning and afternoon deliveries.

 

Jonah plopped down on a pile of flattened cardboard boxes, leaned back on his hands, and looked up at Amy expectantly. “Well?” he prompted, after a few beats of silence.

 

Amy wrung her hands nervously, and avoided eye contact by staring at her feet. “So…umm...okay. You know that movie Groundhog Day?”

 

Jonah opened his mouth, the word ‘sure’ on the tip of his tongue, but caught himself. He considered her question for a moment and then shook his head in disbelief.

 

“No.”

 

“Really?” Amy looked up, mildly surprised. “Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell? It plays on TBS all the ti-”

 

“No,” he cut her off. “I mean, yes, I've seen it. I'm just saying no to what I think you're about to tell me because…because no! That's not a real thing!”

 

Amy threw up her hands. “You asked!”

 

“Yeah, I asked what was going on! As in actually going on, in reality, right now. Not on TV, or in a movie.”

 

“Well right now, that is _exactly_ what’s going on. For the past eight days, my reality has been one day, October 24th, over and over again.”

 

Jonah was shaking his head defiantly.

 

“You don’t believe me.” It wasn’t a question.

 

“I mean, would you believe you?” He replied fairly.

 

Amy tossed her head back and groaned. “No. No, I wouldn’t,” she admitted, defeat clear in her voice. Jonah felt a pang of guilt. For one second, one very brief and fleeting second, he considered that she was telling the truth. If this was all an elaborate prank, she was certainly doing a great job of selling it.

 

He sighed. “Okay, screw it, I’ll play along. You say you’ve lived this day eight times already?”

 

“You don’t have to humor me.”

 

“I know I don’t, but I am. Or do you want me to go back to calling you a liar?”

 

She glared at him.

 

“Didn’t think so. So, you’ve got a real life Groundhog Day situation going on,” he prompted.

 

She sat down on an empty wooden pallet across from him and nodded. “Basically, yeah. I wake up every morning, and it’s always _this_ morning. Everything plays out exactly the same. You saw: the song, Dina, Mateo. The only thing that changes is me.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I mean, I don’t really have to do things the same way. People will still react to whatever I do or say, and that can change things a little. But if I just sit back and watch, then it all plays out like a movie. Same actors, same lines, same everything.”

 

“Huh,” he appeared to be giving the scenario some actual consideration. “What have you actually done differently each day?”

 

Amy gave it some thought, cycling through the past eight days in her head. “Well, the first time the day repeated, I did almost everything exactly the same. I think I thought it was a bad dream, or some fucked up version of deja vu, so I sort of just let it all play out. The next time I came into work, had a panic attack after the first ten minutes or so and went home sick. The next two rounds I called out and hid in bed all day, and just kind of pretended it wasn’t really happening. And the past four I’ve come in each day and paid attention to every detail I could possibly think of.”

 

“Like the songs,” Jonah offered, “But why?”

 

“Because I needed to tell someone, and I needed them to believe me. I couldn’t really think of any better way to prove that I’d seen it all before.”

 

“That someone being me. Am I the first person you’ve tried to explain this to?” He almost sounded flattered.

 

“You are. Don’t let it go to your head,” she added quickly.

 

He smirked. “I’m not but I still gotta ask, why me?”

 

“I don’t know dude, does it really matter?”

 

“If you want me to go along with this and help you out of a very literal existential crisis then yeah, I think it’s a fair question.”

 

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I knew there wasn’t anything I could say that could stop this from sounding unbelievable. I mean, it _is_ unbelievable, I get that. But I guess I thought you were the only person who wouldn’t make me feel stupid, or crazy. I know you think that you’re humoring me right now, and you’re probably waiting for me to yell ‘gotcha!’ and walk away laughing, but you have no idea how good it feels to tell someone about this, even if deep down you think I’m full of shit. I just...I can't keep doing this alone.”

 

She swiped quickly at the corner of her eye with the sleeve of her sweater, and glanced up to find Jonah’s face staring back at her intently. She was surprised by the seriousness of his expression, not unlike the one he wore when he was deep into the New York Times Sunday Crossword.

 

“You’re really telling the truth, aren’t you?” he asked.

 

She let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding in. “I swear. I swear on my life, on Emma’s life, on-”

 

He raised a hand to stop her. “Okay, I get it.”

 

“Really?” Her voice brimmed with equal parts optimism and disbelief.

 

“Really. You don’t have to go swearing Emma’s life on it. I’m in.”

 

A smile broke across Amy’s face. “Thank you. Holy shit, thank you.” If Jonah had any remaining doubts, they were squashed by the sound of pure relief in Amy’s voice. She was generally, not to put too fine a point on it, a terrible liar. But the gratitude she was expressing was no lie. “I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I can ask why you believe me? Like for future reference, in case I have to have this conversation with you again?”

 

Jonah shook his head, looking bemused. “No one specific reason, I suppose. You’ve got no reason to lie to me, and even if you did I’d probably be able to tell. It’s a little bit of that Sherlock Holmes thing too. Eliminate the likely explanations, and whatever’s left is probably the right one, no matter how batshit insane it sounds.”

 

Amy laughed. “I don’t remember Doyle writing that line.”

 

“I’m paraphrasing. And I guess…” his voice drifted off as he searched for the right words. “I guess there’s really nothing to lose by agreeing to help you. Even if I spend the day with you on a wild philosophical goose chase, I still get to spend a day with you.”

 

Amy felt heat rising in her cheeks and she looked down, surprised by the unabashed honesty of his statement. Jonah cleared his throat in a not too subtle attempt to break the awkward silence that had bloomed between them.

 

“So where do we start?” he asked.

 

“I was kind of hoping you’d have an idea,” she replied, mildly embarrassed by the fact that she hadn’t prepared much beyond the initial ‘convincing’ phase of her plan. The idea that he’d actually believe her had seemed so impossible that the whole ‘doing’ phase had never really occurred to her. Jonah seemed to take the lack of preparation in stride.

 

“Right,” he nodded seriously. “So you’ve already re-watched the movie?”

 

“What movie?”

 

“What do you mean what movie? What have we been talking about this whole time? Groundhog Day!”

 

“Oh! Sure! That makes sense, I guess. No, I haven’t.”

 

Jonah looked surprised. “Really? How was that not the first thing you did?”

 

“You’re telling me if you woke up to find yourself stuck in a real life time loop, you’d take a couple hours out to pop in a movie?”

 

“Well it’s not like you don’t have the time to spare.”

 

She gave him a withering looking. “Ha-fucking-ha Jonah.”

 

“I mean it! I’m not trying to make fun, I think it’s actually a really good idea. What other frame of reference is there for this kind of situation?”

 

Amy shrugged. “I don’t know, kind of a lot when you think about it. Source Code, 1408, Edge of Tomorrow,” she ticked off film titles on her fingers. “Pretty much every sci-fi or fantasy TV show from the late 90s and early 2000s. You never watched Charmed?”

 

“Nope, can’t say that I did. Doesn’t matter. None of those movies exist without Groundhog Day. The OG time loop movie.”

 

“I won’t argue that point if you promise to never use the term ‘OG’ again.”

 

“Deal. So why haven’t you watched it?”

 

“I don’t know, I guess I didn’t think it would tell me anything about my situation that I don’t already know.”

 

“When was the last time you actually saw it?”

 

“Maybe ten years ago? I’ve probably caught bits and pieces of it on TV since then.”

 

“Right,” Jonah rose to his feet, a determined look on his face. “That’s our first step. We go back to the source material.”  

 

Amy sighed and pulled herself up. “I’d argue that this is going to be a waste of time, but I’ve had eight days to come up with something better and I got nothing.”

 

“I mean you could’ve just said it was a good idea but whatever. I’ll choose to ignore that qualifier.”

 

“You do that. You think it’s on Netflix?”

 

“Doesn’t matter, I own it on DVD.”

 

“Of course you do,” she chuckled, a new lightness now present in her voice.

 

“See, you’re in a better mood already. I told you this was a good idea.”

 

She shook her head. “It’s not that, it’s just that this is first conversation I’ve had in over a week where I didn’t know exactly what the other person was going to say. It’s different is all.”

 

“And different is good?”

 

“Yeah Jonah. Anything different is good.”


	2. Bill Murray - Fictional Versions or Otherwise

Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell ran into the snow lined streets as the credits began to roll over the scene. Jonah clicked pause on the remote and fell back on to Amy's couch. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the autumn day meant the sun was already slipping low in the sky, leaving the condo's living room bathed in warm light. Half of a picked apart supreme pizza lay between them. It would have been a fairly cozy scene, were it not for the look of existential dread of Amy's face.

 

“You okay there Ames?” Jonah asked cautiously.

 

She shook her head. “If the movie was supposed to be a reassuring, it failed.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“It’s just...I’m not that bad right? Like, I’m not Phil Connors at the beginning of the movie?”

 

Understanding dawned on Jonah’s face. “No, no way! That’s not...just, no. You are a way better person than he was.”

 

“Am I?” she asked incredulously. “Because the whole point of the movie was about him becoming a better person. So if it’s happening to me, then that must mean I’ve got some serious room for improvement.”

 

“I don’t know that that’s true,” Jonah replied, not sounding entirely sure of his own statement.

 

“It’s not exactly a subtle message. He’s pretty much a garbage human at the beginning of the movie, and by the end he’s good enough that Rita and half the town fall in love with him.”

 

“Look, it’s a Bill Murray comedy from the early 90s, you can’t expect a ton of subtlety. And sure, he uses the experiences to become a better person, but self-improvement doesn’t just happen to ‘garbage humans’ in real life. It happens to everyone. Everyone has shit they can work on, even people starting off with a pretty decent baseline.”

 

Amy nodded, willing herself to be reassured by his explanation. She got up off the couch, wandered over to the kitchen, and came back holding two beers. She offered one to Jonah and took a swig of her own.

 

“Okay,” she began, having apparently gathered her thoughts. “Okay, so I’m not as much of a selfish prick as Bill Murray.”

 

“Agreed. Fictional versions or otherwise.”

 

“So what’s my baseline then? What’s the shit I should be using this day to work on?”

 

“Well, you’re a hard worker, and a good mom,” he stated the traits as though they were simple, undeniable fact. “You look out for your friends, especially people like Cheyenne who could use a little...let’s say ‘adult’ guidance every once in a while.”

 

“Well damn, don’t stop there. My baseline sounds great.”

 

“It is,” he agreed, “But it’s probably not as important to this situation as your...less magnanimous traits.”

 

“And what would those be?” she asked, cocking in eyebrow.

 

“Well,” Jonah began cautiously, “Some people might say- not me, necessarily, but some people - that you can, at times, exhibit a bit of a martyr complex.” He rushed out the last few words and technically said them more in the direction of a couch pillow then to Amy’s face.

 

Amy shook her head in seeming disbelief. “I beg your pardon?”

 

“Look, you can’t get mad at me for this,” Jonah replied defensively. “If the whole point of this thing is self-improvement then you have to be willing to face the fact that you might have some things that you could work on. Not things that make you a bad person, but aren’t all that great either.” He crossed his arms over his chest, possibly out of an evolutionary instinct to protect himself in the presence of the death glare that Amy was giving him.

 

“Fine,” she huffed, not sounding particularly fine at all. “Could you please elaborate on this apparent martyr complex?”

 

“I mean, it kinda relates back to all the good stuff I was talking about before. You’re a really hard worker and you look after your friends. Which means you’ll cover practically anyone’s shift when they need it, but you also never let anyone forget that you did them the favor. You’re a great mom, but half the time you talk about the stuff you do for Emma, it comes across as a roundabout way to describe how Adam dropped the ball in the first place. And, honestly, it can be kinda hard to share a crappy day with you because you inevitably end up one-upping everyone else’s crap.”

 

The righteous indignation had slowly drained from Amy’s face and had been replaced by a general look of shame and guilt. She killed the last of her beer in a long swig and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

 

“Well...shit,” she finally replied.

 

“Sorry,” he offered rather meekly. Ever the people pleaser, Jonah seemed uneasy upon discovering that brutal honesty felt a lot more brutal than it did honest.

 

Amy sighed and fell back into the couch. “Nah, it’s fine. Well, not fine. Nothing about this situation is fine, but all you did was answer my question. So what now?”

 

“I wasn’t finished.”

 

“Dude you’ve really got more shit to dump on me? Do I not donate enough to charity? Is it that I refuse to watch movies without reading spoilers first?”

 

“You actually do that? Why?”

 

“I want to know if the ending is disappointing so I don’t waste my money! Movie tickets are expensive and I’m a single mom on a budget and I don’t get to treat myself all that often and oh shit I’m doing it right now aren’t I?”

 

“The martyr thing? Yeah, a little bit.”

 

“Ah crap.” She grabbed the nearest pillow, buried her head in it, and groaned.

 

“I think I have some good news, if you’d like to hear it.” He tried to infuse his voice with optimism and only mildly succeeded. Amy grunted into the pillow, which Jonah took as a signal to keep talking.

 

“I think that the reason you pull the martyr complex is that you feel pretty unappreciated in your life. It’s hard to spend years wanting to vent to your husband about not having much support when he’s the one, you know...not supporting you.”

 

Amy looked up, a curious expression on her face. Jonah was normally painfully diplomatic when it came to talking about Adam, even when Glenn had spilled the beans about them entering marriage counseling. This was the first time he’d offered a comment about him that could be described as anything other than neutral.

 

“And when it comes to work,” he continued, “you probably feel pretty stuck. No amount of hard work is really going to get you any higher up the ladder than store manager, which you don’t even want to be anyways. I think if you hit Glenn’s age and found yourself still working for Cloud 9, you’d kill yourself by diving off the ladder head first.”

 

Amy was surprised by the sound of her own laughter. It was the first time she’d had something to laugh about in eight days. Jonah was just relieved to see any expression on her face that wasn’t some variation of existential dread or panicked crisis.

 

“So if you’re never going to get any professional acknowledgement for the work you put in, you seek out personal acknowledgement instead.”

 

“Fuck man, forget business school,” Amy said, giving him an appraising look. “You should’ve gone into psychiatry instead. You’re like a weird hipster version of Dr. Phil.”

 

Jonah laughed and shook his head. “Nah, hard pass. My parents are both therapists, which was exactly as much fun to grow up with as it sounds. But it did make give me a decent appreciation for the power of human empathy, so I guess that’s something.”

 

“Well it sounded like you were on a roll there Lil’ Freud. Go ahead and drop some more advice, I’m all ears.”

 

“I don’t know that Freud gave much thought to infinite time loops, but in my opinion you should be using these days to bring some balance into your life.”

 

“What, like feng-shui? What’s the point of that if all the furniture goes right back where it was before the next day?” She sounded serious but Jonah saw a little spark in her eye that was always present when she teased him. So, most days.

 

“Cute, but no. I mean balance out the areas that you lack fulfillment in that end up bringing out those shitty traits. Spend a day with Emma without worrying about what Adam’s doing at home. Go see a movie or hell, five movies, without reading spoilers first and don’t consider the ticket cost or taking the time off. You sure as shit shouldn’t be coming into work. I may not know much about metaphysics or fate or whatever the hell is causing this but whatever it is, I highly doubt these days were meant to be spent on the clock at a job you hate.”

 

“Fair point. So how long should it take? How many times do I need to repeat a day until I restore balance or whatever to my soul?”

 

At that, Jonah could only shake his head.

 

“Not even a guess?” she pleaded. “How many days did Bill Murray have to repeat until he go better?”

 

“I looked it up,” Jonah replied hesitantly, pulling his phone from his pocket. “But you’re not going to like it.”

 

“Spit it out.”

 

“Okay, well, there is some debate about this point. There’s the old adage that it takes ten years of practice to truly master a skill, and his character did master the piano throughout the movie.”

 

“Ten years? Jesus Christ man, I was hoping you’d say a couple weeks. That’d be a vacation for me, but ten years…”

 

Jonah visibly cringed. “I wasn’t finished.” He took a deep breath and scrolled down the page he had open on his phone. “Harold Ramis, the director, was a Buddhist. And according to certain beliefs of theirs, it can take up ten thousand years for a soul to evolve to...I don’t really know what you’d call it. The next level? Enlightenment? So I guess the answer is anywhere between ten and ten thousand years, depending on your interpretation.”

 

Amy’s mouth hung open, and Jonah looked up to find the very real threat of tears swimming in her eyes. “Ten...ten thousand years? Three million some odd days? No. No fucking way.”

 

Jonah moved down the couch and placed his arm around her shoulders. She folded into him and felt tears leak out on to his flannel shirt. For a few minutes they silently contemplated the idea of three million six hundred and fifty thousand identical days, interrupted only by the occasional sound of Amy sniffling.

 

“I know I said that this movie was the source for all other time loop stories, but that really doesn’t make it gospel,” he offered. “Do you want to watch that Charmed episode instead? Maybe they only had to do this thing for like a month or two.”

 

He heard her chuckle softly into his shoulder and felt a little knot of worry relax in his stomach. Laughter, the non-hysterical kind at least, probably meant she wasn’t teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The edge was still within spitting distance, sure, but not quite as close as it had been.

 

“No thanks. I appreciate the offer but I don’t think whatever solution there might be to this problem is going to involve Alyssa Milano in any way, shape, or form.”

 

“Maybe we should give her a call just in case,” Jonah suggested, earning a a throw pillow to the face from Amy.

 

“So what now?”

 

“I think I just want to crawl in bed and hide from the world for a little while. Pretend this isn’t happening until the clock resets again.” Exhaustion filled her voice.

 

“And after that?”

 

“I guess I’ll give your self-fullfillment idea a go. Maybe pull Emma out of school and treat ourselves to a spa day. I miss her, I haven’t seen her since this whole thing started.”

 

Jonah nodded. “That doesn’t sound like a bad start. And if it doesn’t work, then screw it. I don’t think anything counts as a wasted day when you get so many of them.”

 

Amy cocked her head to the side and gave Jonah a strange look.

 

“What? Was that insensitive? Do you want to hit me with a pillow again?”

 

Amy smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I was just thinking how nice this was, having someone to talk to. And then I realized that tomorrow you’re not going to remember a thing, because it won’t really be tomorrow. I’ll be on my own, all over again.”

 

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say. He really was good when it came to empathizing with people, but that could only go so far. Amy was describing a kind of loneliness that bordered on solipsism, and he’d be damned if there was any therapy in the world was specifically built to handle this situation. “You can always tell me again. You know I’ll believe you.”

 

“You will?” She looked doubtful.

 

“Of course. You’ll make me believe.” He rose from the couch and began to clear up living room table.

 

Amy waved him off. “It’s fine, I got it. Go home.”

 

“You sure?”

 

“Yeah, I think you’ve done more than enough for me today. Screw time loops and ten thousand years of existence, but I think I can handle the dishes on my own.”

 

Jonah smiled, relieved to hear her crack a joke. He grabbed his jacket off its hook, and patted his pockets until he heard the jingle of his car keys. He reached for the front door, paused, and turned back to Amy. He took her by surprise, pulling her into a tight hug. She felt him press a quick kiss into the top of her head. There and gone, just like that. When he pulled back she looked up at him, confused.

 

“What was that for?”

 

He rested his hands on her shoulders and looked her square in the eye. “You’re not alone, okay? You might have to convince every day for ten thousand years, but I’ll believe you. Every time.” He dropped his hands, not waiting for a reply, and turned towards the door.

 

“You can’t know that,” Amy called after him.

 

“Sure I can,” he called back, as the front door closed behind him.

 


	3. An Objection to Benevolent Living

Self-serving fulfillment ultimately turned out to be ineffective, but damned if it wasn’t a good time. For the first week or so Amy followed Jonah’s original suggestions. She called out of work, let Emma play hooky from school, and treated them to all things she had dreamed of doing with her daughter if they’d had more money when she was growing up. Amy was no richer for being stuck a infinite number of Tuesdays, but it turned out the knowledge that her credit card bill was never going to come in the mail was the next best thing. 

 

They went to the nicest spas in the city, ate at the fanciest restaurants, bought clothing from stores too classy to have a clearance rack. Amy took a few days completely to herself, once heeding Jonah’s advice by taking in every single movie featured at her local theater. Most of them were, generally speaking, complete shit. But she did find something freeing in the lack of guilt that usually came with having wasted her money on something disappointing. She wondered if rich people knew what a privilege it was to have enough money that you can afford for things to be cheap and shitty. 

 

It was the longest vacation, if you could call it that, that she had ever taken from work. No more blue vests, no more failed attempts by Glenn to institute a prayer circle during their lunch breaks, no more customers asking ‘if it doesn’t scan, does that mean it’s free?’. It was also the longest she had gone without seeing Adam. Even when they had started their separation, she had still seen him at least a few times a week while coordinating drop offs and pickups for Emma. They had been together since high school, almost fifteen years, and had known each other even longer than that. She caught herself waiting for the significance of that to hit her, for the weight of fifteen years of another person’s presence to feel like...anything at all. But it didn’t, and that realization carried a whole weight of its own. 

 

After almost two months, she began to suspect that there was no great lesson to be learned in a never-ending cycle of ‘treat yourself’ days. It was fun, no argument there, but if her soul was supposed to be maturing to another plane of understanding or whatever in God’s name Harold Ramis had believed, she was pretty sure that no amount of facials or shopping sprees was going to get it there. 

 

And so the next time she woke up, bright and early as ever on Tuesday the 24th, she picked up her phone, placed a call to Glenn (she had the fake sore throat voice down to an art form), and drove herself to Jonah’s apartment. She had to hammer on the door for a good three minutes before he finally opened up, bleary eyed and clothed in a pair of plaid boxers and a faded Habitat for Humanity t-shirt. 

 

“Amy?” he mumbled, voice thick with sleep.

 

“Good morning sunshine,” she replied with equal parts cheer and sarcasm.

 

“Is it?” he asked, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Because it’s barely seven AM. And that might be the morning but I don’t know about the good part.”

 

“You know, you’re normally you’re a lot more cheerful in the morning, it’s one of your more annoying qualities,” she replied, shoving a to-go cup of coffee in his hand.

 

“Yeah, well normally I don’t get woken up an hour before my first alarm is even supposed to go off. What is this?” He was looking down at the cup she’d given him.

 

“Oh it’s great. I got it from the co-op that just opened up down the street from me. French pressed, fair trade organic beans. You’ll love it.”

 

“Really?”

 

“No, it’s from 7-11. Drink up.”

 

He made no attempt to hide his eye roll, but he took a reluctant sip anyway. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here so early?”

 

“Depends, are you going to invite me in?”

 

He ran a hand through his hair in attempt to tame the bed head he realized he was probably sporting. “I don’t know, the place is a mess,” he replied, glancing back over his shoulder and frowning. “Can you give me five minutes to make it a little more presentable? And maybe put some pants on?”

 

“Counter-offer. We go to Waffle House instead. My treat.”

 

“Can I still put pants on first?”

 

Amy shrugged. “Your call, not like anyone at Waffle House would care.”

 

\--

 

As far as Jonah could tell, every item on the Waffle House menu was on the table before them, flanked by cups of fresh coffee. Amy was spooning a bit of everything on to her plate when she noticed the awkward look on his face. 

 

“What?” she asked through a mouthful of bacon. 

 

“Nothing. Time travel really works up an appetite huh?”

 

He had taken the news in stride on the car ride over. It had played out much the way it had the first time she had told him, but with the added benefit of already knowing most of his responses. When she had described their viewing of the movie, and Jonah’s promise that he would always believe her, he had nodded. “Sounds like me,” he admitted. Amy was pleasantly surprise at how willing Jonah was to keep to a promise he couldn’t technically remember making.

 

“Oh all this?” she asked, gesturing to the feast before them. “Yeah, it’s the same as the credit card bill. I wake up every morning the same weight as I always do, so after the first week or so I really stopped giving a shit about calories. Ham steak?” She offered him a plate.

 

Jonah eyed it warily. “No thanks, I’m good with the oatmeal.”

 

Her shoulders slumped and she rolled her eyes. “Seriously? It’s not like this meal counts for you either. You get a reset too, you just don’t remember it.” She waved the plate under his nose and saw his resolve waver.

 

“Okay, fuck it, give it here. And cough up one of those waffles over there, you’ve got five of them.”

 

“There we go! Nice to have someone to really lean into this with me.”

 

“Yeah, I don’t really think that’s what Sheryl Sandberg was talking about, but we'll go with that.” He packed some eggs and hash browns on to his plate and proceeded to drown the whole concoction in syrup. Their waitress wandered over and wordlessly held out a carafe of fresh coffee.

 

“Please and thank you Ruth.” Amy held out her mug, and didn’t seem to notice the strange look Ruth gave her at the casual use of her name. She glanced down at her nametag and shook her head as she walked away, having settled on a simple solution to her unspoken question. 

 

“Friend of yours?” Jonah asked.

 

“Oh Ruth and I go way back. I could tell you all about her sciatica and the douchebag her oldest daughter brought home for Thanksgiving last year, but I think we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

 

“Right, so your journey of enlightenment isn’t going so hot?”

 

“I probably shouldn’t be too surprised. I highly doubt God or Buddha or whatever Scientologists believe in put me in this situation just so I could stay at five star hotels and take spa days with Emma.”

 

“St. Louis has five star hotels?”

 

“Eh,” she wavered her hand in a ‘so-so’ motion. “Only like two of them, but I rotated through all their nicest suites a few times.” 

 

Jonah shoveled some hash browns into his mouth and seemed to take his time chewing while thinking through an idea in his mind.

 

“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound too good, but I still think the basic premise was a solid one: find what your soul is lacking and figure out how to fill it.”

 

“I didn’t know that my soul was lacking all that much to begin with. No more than anyone else’s at least. I mean, come on, look at who we work with: Justine tries to convince everyone she’s a drunken slut because she think that will actually make people hate her less, Sandra is, well, Sandra, Cheyenne is married to a man whose main goal in life is to make it big enough as a rapper that he gets invited to be a guest star on Wild n’ Out, and Marcus wants to milk humans. Am I really the one whose soul needs improvement?”  

 

Jonah shook his head. “Not the point. The best person you know probably isn’t as great as Mother Teresa and the worst person you know probably isn’t as bad as Hitler. You can make comparisons til the cows come home, it’s not going to get you anywhere.”

 

“Yeah,” Amy huffed. “That’s basically what you said last time.”

 

“Well maybe you’ll start listening, because chances are I’m going to end up saying it again at some point if you don’t,” he teased.

 

“Don’t get smart. Maybe I’ll just start going to someone with this problem, test drive someone else’s ideas.”

 

“Really?” Jonah cocked an eyebrow skeptically. “Who’s after me on your roster? Glenn would probably try to perform an exorcism, Dina would have you committed, and Garrett wouldn’t be able to stop laughing long enough to tell you he doesn’t believe you. I’m all you got honey.”

 

“Honey?” she parrotted back, pitching her head forward and miming a gag with her open mouth. “Bring the ego down a few notches there.”

 

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Felt weird when I said it, but I was on such a good roll.”

 

“Well redeem yourself then and tell me what my soul is lacking. I’m not getting any younger over here. Or older, which I guess is more the point.”

 

“I really don’t know how to answer that. People spend their whole lives trying to ‘know thyself’ and that’s hard enough as it is. But,” he insisted, seeing Amy ready to protest, “I can make an educated guess, which is better than nothing.”

 

Amy, having decided to swallow whatever she was going to say before, waved her hand in the air, motioning for him to continue his thought.

 

“Since my first suggestion at self improvement involved internalized good deeds, things done solely by you/for you, then I guess the next logical suggestion would be to go external. Help those around you. Take the day, as many of them as you get, to improve yourself by improving the lives of others.”

 

Amy looked less than impressed by the idea. “Look Jonah, I knew this was coming. I saw the same movie you did. He saves the kid falling out of the tree, stops the guy from choking, counsels those newlyweds. And that’s real nice and all, but do you know what the population of Punxsutawney was in 1993? You don’t, and I already googled it, so I’ll just tell you: six thousand people. Do you know how many people live in St. Louis? Over three hundred thousand. Even if I knew everyone who was going to fall out of tree or choke on a piece of steak today, I couldn’t save them all if I tried.”

 

“And I’m not saying you should, but just because you can’t solve every person’s problem in the tri-state area doesn’t mean you can’t do some good in a few people’s lives. It all counts for something. You wouldn’t turn down donating to a food bank just because there are kids in Africa who are still going to starve.”

 

Amy took a sip of coffee and gave it some thought. It sounded like a good idea, in a very literal sense of the term, but something about that fact nagged at her that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Jonah noticed her hesitation.

 

“You know it doesn’t look good that you apparently jumped at my suggestion for spa days and fancy hotels but the idea of charity apparently gives you pause, right?”

 

Amy glared back at him. “Very funny, but I think I’ve got a legit objection here.”

 

“An objection to benevolent living, this should be good.”

 

“My only objection is that it wouldn’t really be benevolent, would it?’

 

“How do you mean?” 

 

“I mean, we’re talking about how this whole thing is supposed to be making me a better person, but that’s not exactly honest, is it? It’s about making me better _enough_. Better enough that I get to wake up tomorrow and have it actually be tomorrow. Any good I go out and do comes from a selfish place. Is it really going to fulfill my soul if my motivations aren’t pure?”

 

Jonah sighed and leaned his head forward into his own propped up hands. He rubbed his eyes and looked up at her, defeat beginning to show on his face. “I have no fucking idea.”

 

“Sorry?” she countered, genuinely confused by his lack of insight.

 

“I don’t know how to answer that. It’s a great question for a priest, or a rabbi, or a professor of moral philosophy. But not a business school drop out pulling minimum wage at a glorified K-Mart. If I could answer that question I would probably be making at least $15 an hour, but as of right now it’s above my pay grade.”

 

Amy suddenly felt a trickle of guilt slide across her mind, making her acutely aware of the pressure she was putting him under. A degree of separation, almost numbness, to the feelings of others was an unfortunate side effect of living life on repeat, and knowing that you’re the only one aware of it. At some point she stopped considering the day to day pains and pressures experienced by everyone around her because she could simply tell herself that come the morning, they won’t know what happened, what will happen, what always happens. They had the benefit of ignorance, and she had the weight of knowledge. It was a perfect recipe for either bitterness or detachment, and most of the time she picked detachment. But here she was, throwing that weight on to Jonah instead, and feeling decidedly _not_ detached about it.

 

He was wholly unprepared for the situation, despite having seen Groundhog Day so many times that he knew the director’s commentary by heart, and yet was doing an impressive job of coming up with ideas to help her. But ultimately he couldn’t know everything, and she really couldn’t expect him to. He was trying and that was enough for her. 

 

“You’re right,” she told him.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“I said you’re right.”

 

“I know you did, it’s just not something I get to hear from you very often. If I start recording on my phone would you mind repeating it directly into the mic, for posterity?”

 

She chucked a napkin at his head. “What posterity, it won’t exist the next time you wake up!”

 

“Yeah but it’s not even nine yet, I can ride this wave all day.” His smiled so wide that his eyes crinkled and she could have seen the fillings on his molars, if he’d had any. But this was a man who once brought a water pick to the store’s white elephant Christmas party and seemed genuinely confused as to why Mateo was less than thrilled to get stuck with it by the end of the game. “But it has a pulse setting!” he’d insisted.

 

“I’m not saying it again,” she said, shaking her head and plucking a piece of toast from a dwindling stack. “But I am acknowledging that you are trying your best to help me out of an impossible situation and that I shouldn’t expect you to have all the answers. It’s a lot to put on you. You’re basically a ball of anxiety crammed into a plaid shirt and a too-tight pants at the best of times, so I should just be grateful you’re here at all. It’s the trying that counts.”

 

He gave her an amused look, and cocked his head to the side silently.

 

“What? That was a pretty damned good apology, what more do you want?”

 

He remained quiet with that strange smile on his face. It was almost taunting her.

 

“For God’s sake Jonah wha---oh….oooooohhhhhh shit. Seriously? You reverse psychology-ed me? That’s actually a thing?!”

 

He let the smirk break into a genuine smile and laughed.

 

“I wasn’t trying to do anything. You did that to yourself. And you made a damn fine point: it’s the trying that counts.”

 

She wanted to be annoyed with him, smack him, argue with him. But she’d just be arguing against herself, a fact that infuriated her. Jonah allowed himself a moment to bask in her frustration before he decided to throw her a rope.

 

“Take your own advice, and forget about your motivations. Just try. Try to be decent to others, try to help someone in a way that no one else can. Or just in a way that no one else will, whatever.”

 

“Goddamnit,” she muttered into her last bite of crust. “Are all children of shrinks this bad, or are you just really committed to the role?”

 

“I never told you…” he trailed of, voice confused, thought incomplete. 

 

She raised her eyebrows at him and threw up her arms as if to ask _Haven't you been paying attention_?

 

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and a tight smile formed on his face. “I told you my parents were therapists huh?”

 

“Yeah, it came up. Why?”

 

“No reason. Did I…I mean, did anything else come up in conversation?”

 

Now it was Amy's turn to look confused. “You mean about you? Not really, no. We were kinda focused on me for, you know, obvious reasons. Why?”

 

Jonah’s whole body seemed to relax a little. “Nothing. Just curious is all.” Amy squinted at him, clearly not satisfied with his explanation. He continued, “I guess I'm just realizing that this whole thing kinda puts us on really uneven footing. Anything I tell you is permanent. Anything you tell me has an expiration date. This could be our hundredth time having this conversation and I wouldn't know it.”

 

"Is there something you're worried about telling me?" she asked, more curious than sarcastic.

 

He opened his mouth to speak, and quickly shut it. He gave a her a look she could not decipher. Not quite regretful, but a close cousin to it. He shook his head.

 

“Well this is only the second time. Scouts honor.” She held up two fingers and placed her other hand over her heart. 

 

“Scouts honor has three fingers,” Jonah noted dryly. Amy quickly added a third finger and then shrugged, dropping her hands all together. 

 

“The closest I ever got to any kind of scout was box of thin mints stashed in my freezer. I promise you we haven't had this conversation a hundred times.”

 

“I believe you,” he insisted. “Still weird.”

 

“I'm well aware of that fact. Trust me, I'd love to not have to have to jump through these hoops everytime we talk. I wish there was like, a code word or phrase that I could say to you and you'd believe everything I said after that. You know like how stage hypnotists can get people to cluck like chickens at the sound of a Bruce Springsteen song hours after the show is over?”

 

Jonah chewed at his lower lip for a second, his brows drawn together in thought. “Well…it's not Born in the USA, but I might have the next best thing.”

 

“It was a joke dude, I'm not hypnotizing you.”

 

“No, of course not. I'm going to tell you something that no one else in the world knows. Something you could only have heard from me. And the next time you need to bring me up to speed, you just start with that. Trust that I'll trust myself.”

 

Amy was pleasantly surprised at the suggestion, and almost annoyed that she hadn't thought of it herself. “That could work. Something short and to the point, that I could only know about from you. You're not about to tell me you killed someone are you? No hit and runs to get off your chest? Oh no no no, let me guess: a Peruvian love child from your semester at sea?”

 

Jonah pinched the bridge of his nose, his expression already mildly pained. “I'm already regretting what I'm about to tell you.”

 

“Oh don't be like that.” She swiped his hand away from his face. “I'll stop making fun of you when you start being less ridiculous. So what have you got? What's the super secret password to get you to believe me without having to buy you breakfast every time?”

 

Jonah took a deep breath. “Okay…okay. When I was sixteen I lost my virginity to Sara Aronofsky in the synagogue of a Jewish sleepaway camp.”

 

Amy almost choked on her coffee, sending an undignified spray across the table. Jonah wordlessly dabbed a napkin on his own arm while she caught her breath. “I'm sorry, that was...hmm...I'm sorry but did you say _in_ a synagogue? Like, in the building, on a pew?”

 

“Yes, in the building. No, not on a pew. On the floor behind the pews.” He was staring determinedly at the empty plate in front of him. 

 

“The floor? Oh man that’s even better. I really don't know much about Judaism in general, but that's gotta be considered sacrilegious right? I know there isn’t a specific commandment against banging in a house of worship, but I feel like it’s just sort of implied.”

 

“We were teenagers!” he snapped, his outburst drawing a concerned look from the truck driver at the table next to them. He waved apologetically and dropped his voice. “We both worked at the camp, we'd spent all summer flirting. One night we managed to steal a bottle of manischewitz wine from one of the older staff members. We knew no one would be in the building that late and it just kinda…happened.”

 

“And no one else knows about this?” She was trying to be serious but was clearly struggling to hold back her laughter. 

 

“Just me and Sara.”

 

“And God.” She added solemnly, though she was clearly struggling to keep a straight face. Even Jonah seemed to be fighting back a smile.

 

“Yes, just you and God, as if this whole situation hadn’t given you an inflated sense of self-importance as it is.”

 

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” she said, waving down Ruth for the check, “but I take offense to that on principle.”

 

“You do that. Now the next time you want to bring me up to speed, you’ve got a built in shortcut.”

 

Amy smiled appreciatively. “It’s a good idea. I promise you won’t regret it.”

 

“Well it’s not like I’ll remember it if I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few Good Place easter eggs for you all, in honor of the return of best Thursday night pairing in the world.


	4. An Otherwise Unremarkable Deviation

In lieu of chasing down every kid determined to fall out of a tree in St. Louis on that particular Tuesday, Amy decided to focus on the more featured players of her life, starting with her fellow Cloud 9 employees. She remembered a poster that had hung in her ninth grade English teacher’s classroom. The words “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile” were superimposed over a black and white photo of Albert Einstein’s face. Amy soon reached the conclusion that Einstein had never spent much time working in retail.

 

First there was Dina, who Amy offered to help in any way she might need around her house since she was entering her third trimester and was, in fact, roughly the size of a house herself. Dina had seemed suspicious of the offer at first, before Amy reminded her that she’d been in her shoes before, shoes filled with giant swollen pregnant lady feet, and knew that how hard it was to carry out even the simplest tasks without anyone around to help you.

 

“But you had Adam around didn’t you?” Dina had asked.

 

“Yeah, like I said, I know how hard it is to not have any help when you’re pregnant,” Amy had replied dryly. Dina considered her offer with a bit more appreciation this time before admitting that there were a few things she could use a hand with, and asking how comfortable Amy felt around birds. 

 

That marked the first red flag that Amy ignored, a sign that she should rescind her offer, run home, and try a different approach in the morning. Maybe bring in Dina her favorite breakfast and some Pepto Bismol and call it a day. But then a little voice in the back of her head recited that stupid goddamn Einstein quote, and reminded her that everything, even the small acts, count for something. Okay, who was she kidding, it was Jonah’s voice, and it was as smug in her subconscious as it usually was in real life, but she still allowed it to force a smile on to her face and reply to Dina, “I love ‘em!”

 

It turned out she really didn’t. In theory she did. She loved the penguin exhibit at the zoo, and she liked that documentary from a few years back about that girl who flew the plane with the migrating geese. When it came to Dina’s birds, she was decidedly less enthused, and the birds didn’t seem to care much for her either. Every attempt at opening a cage resulted in shallow bleeding peck marks on her knuckles or the back of her hand. There was a cockatoo that Amy was fairly certain had tried pooping on her on purpose, though she kept that accusation to herself and made sure to give it a wide berth whenever she passed its cage. She also wasn’t sure how many pet birds it technically takes to constitute animal hoarding, but the fact that she had to fight the urge to count them just in case told her that Dina was probably pretty close to the cut off, if not a parakeet or two over it.

 

She spent the late afternoon and early evening helping to temporarily consolidate a number of the birds into smaller cages in order to make room for the new aviary that Dina wanted to erect in her living room. The aviary itself would cover almost a hundred square feet and stand eight feet tall, essentially filling the living room wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Amy glanced over the construction designs of the structure. It looked like gibberish to her, but she had never put together anything more complicated than an Ikea dresser.

 

“Dina, I know you love your birds, I really do, but are you seriously prepared to give up this whole room to them? Where are you going to watch TV?”

 

“Don’t own one,” Dina replied matter-of-factly 

 

Amy did a double take, “You don’t own a TV?”

 

“Did I stutter?” 

 

Amy ignored the question, having known Dina for too long to pay any mind to the condescension in her voice.

 

“Are you one of those douche bags who think they’re more enlightened than the rest of us by not owning a TV?”

 

Dina snorted. “Of course not, I just don’t have any time to watch it. Taking care of these guys is a full time job, on top of my actual full time job. Why am I even explaining this to you? You get it, you’re a parent.” She reached through the bars of the cage closest to her and lovingly stroked the beak of her gray parrot, Isaac.

 

“Please don’t compare my child to a parrot.”

 

“Hey, if I could have given birth to each and everyone of these guys I would have,” Dina said defensively.

 

For a brief moment, her mind conjured up a rather horrifying image of a feather coated Dina sitting atop an egg, roughly the size of a basketball, in a large human-sized nest. Amy shook her head, feeling vaguely like she had stepped into a Far Side cartoon. “Dina, you do realize you’re actually pregnant right? Like right now, with a human baby?”

 

“Sure, with Glenn’s spawn, not my kid. These guys are my real babies.”

 

Amy opened her mouth to protest the absolute absurdity of that statement, but closed it at the sight of Dina picking up a large bag of feed, almost as large as the pregnant belly she was already carrying around, and dispensing precise portions into various feeding dishes. Amy remembered being that pregnant and wanting to do nothing but sleep and eat. _Second trimester energy boost my ass_ , she had thought ruefully. There wasn’t enough money or Reese’s peanut butter cups in the world that could have convinced her to come home after a day of working at Cloud 9 and erect an aviary larger than your average prison cell while almost seven months pregnant. Fuck that. Fuck all of that.

 

But here Dina was, doing just that. Maybe it was ridiculous and borderline offensive to compare taking care of her pet birds to raising a child, but Amy really couldn’t say that she wasn’t just as dedicated to the task. So instead she did something that didn’t really come naturally to her when she wasn’t on the clock. She bit her tongue, smiled, and asked Dina what else she could do to help. 

 

Few other favors she did her coworkers ended up being quite as labor intensive, or painful, as Dina’s birds had been. When asked if, given his mysterious injury, Mateo needed a hand with anything, she took his restocking duties for the day so he wouldn’t have to go up and down the stepladder. 

 

Sandra had asked for help picking out some new bedding. Jerry was coming home from the hospital next week and she wanted to give his bedroom a makeover as a welcome home gift, but couldn’t bring herself to choose between the Star Wars of the Harry Potter bedspreads.

 

“You’re sure those are the ones you should be choosing between?” Amy asked cautiously, not wanting to sound condescending no matter how much the options baffled her.

 

“For sure,” Sandra replied. “I mean on the one hand, he’s a total Hufflepuff, but on the other hand he would make such a good Jedi too. He loves both series, and I just really want him to know how much I missed him while he was in the coma, you know?”

 

“I do. Not the coma part, but the letting someone know you care about them thing.” Amy smiled, feeling a little pang of guilt at the realization that this tendency towards care and kindness that Sandra was demonstrating towards the man she loved was, in fact, the same one that allowed Amy and her coworkers to walk all over her on a fairly regular basis.

 

Glenn was an easy favor, simply asking if Amy could pick up Jerusha and drop her off at the ultrasound tech, as he had to work late and they only had the one car.

 

Marcus wouldn’t specify what he wanted help with, only asking that Amy accompany him to a nearby hospital after work. When Amy had inquired as to why he needed to go to the hospital, if he maybe had an appointment he was nervous to go to by himself, or perhaps he just wanted some company to visit a sick relative, he had replied that he’d heard the hospital had recently made some major upgrades to its maternity ward and he wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Amy shut that one down hard. She knew her goal had been to offer help to her friends and coworkers, but she considered ripping Marcus a new asshole for wanting to stalk newly lactating moms a favor to women everywhere, and maybe even society as a whole.

 

Justine just wanted to someone to willingly eat lunch with her at work.

 

Cheyenne had jumped at Amy’s offer of help in order to lock her down her as a Harmonica’s babysitter for the night. It turned out the October 24th was the anniversary of the day she and Bo had met. It had been at an early Halloween party and Cheyenne had dressed up as a slutty Little Red Riding Hood. Or, rather, she had been wearing a red mini skirt and white peasant crop top, so same difference really. Bo had been a wolf. Perhaps the first wolf to wear knock off Air Jordans (the Nike check was backwards, but no one had the heart to point it out), but a wolf nonetheless. To hear Cheyenne tell it, the matching costumes made it fate, on par with Jack and Rose meeting on the Titanic. Amy didn’t know where to begin dissecting that comparison, given that Jack died at the end of the movie, and that she was fairly certain that Cheyenne believed Jack and Rose had been real people. She fell back on the usual response she saved for when she had gone as deep into the shallow end of Cheyenne’s mind as her patience would allow, and simply said, “That sounds really nice.” 

 

Amy and Harmonica spent a night watching Finding Nemo (Amy watched, Harmonica switched between napping and squealing with delight at the sounds of Ellen Degeneres’s voice coming from the television speakers), and they both shared a filling dinner of apple sauce and mac n’ cheese. Cheyenne had insisted that Harmonica was fully on solids and could just have some of whatever Amy had, but the idea of sharing a Lean Cuisine with a toddler had given her some pause, so she’d dug out the softest and most kid-friendly foods she could find in her kitchen. 

 

As she watched Harmonica doze on the floor of her pack n’ play while the end credits rolled, she realized how much she missed from when Emma was that age. Usually when prompted to recall the first couple years of her daughter’s life, the first word that came to mind was stress. Not just the usual stress that every parent had to deal with: sleepless nights, cluster feeding, randomly feeling the need to check that the baby was still breathing when she slept for more than an hour at a stretch. It was also trying to find someone to watch Emma so she could pick up a last minute extra shift at the store. It was wondering if she was overburdening her parents by moving Adam into their house so they could save up money for their own place. It was trying to build up a little college fund for herself, just enough to take a class or two at the local community college once Emma had weaned, only for the a busted car part or uncovered prescription to rear its ugly head and wipe it out. 

 

But there were so many little things that she didn’t know she would miss until they were gone. Like the smell of a baby, fresh out of a bath. Or the first time she heard Emma laugh. Better yet, the first time she learned what to do to _make_ Emma laugh. Or hearing her shriek with glee when Amy would come home after a double shift. She remembered hearing that shriek and wondering if babies really were just like dogs, constantly convinced their owners were never coming home again, and greeting them like they’d made it back from a decade long crusade as opposed to a ten minute trip to the grocery store. 

 

Amy enjoyed looking after Harmonica so much that she actually volunteered to do so for a week straight, not that it was much of a week from Bo and Cheyenne’s perspectives. It felt a little like cheating as far as life experiences went. Amy was perfectly aware that she had hit the age in her life that could most accurately be described as ‘shit or get off the pot’ in regards to having a family. It was the age where most childless women started to get some seriously pointed looks at family gatherings when their biggest life announcement was a promotion at work or the adoption of a new cat, and not a little human bundle of joy instead. The age when parents started to ask the question ’so when are you going to make me a grandparent?’ with less cheer and more desperation in their voices. 

 

The irony of course being that Amy had already had her bundle of joy, and her mother had been Nana Sosa for a good fifteen years by that point. She’d managed to get in a birth, marriage, and divorce just in time to feel shamed for not being settled down and knocked up like most of the girls she had gone to school with. A week of looking after Harmonica gave her a glimpse of a life she could be leading if she had done everything in the right order, and at the right age. 

 

Of course Amy was smart enough, or at least had enough life experience, to understand that there was no such thing as the right order or right age to start a family. If there were, then Glenn and Jerusha wouldn’t be waiting on bated breath for Dina of all people to give birth to their child. But if there were ever two people born to be parents, it was them. That kid was going to grow up with older parents than the rest of its peers, and with the weirdest goddamn origin story imaginable, but they would also grow up feeling loved and cared for and valued. 

 

And if there were, she wouldn’t have Emma. As snarky and hormonal as the girl could be sometimes, Amy wouldn’t have traded her for anything, not even for different, more traditionally successful version of her life. 

 

But she was also human, and therefore could not fight the urge to look at Harmonica and allow her mind to drift to fantasies of a college degree, a salaried job with full benefits, and a house in a nicer neighborhood. The realtor had pitched her current condo to her using words like ‘up and coming’ and ‘diamond in the rough’. Amy’s bullshit-meter had gone off, but it was the best they could afford at the time, and was just barely on the right side of the borderline to a very good school district. It was just another compromise she had made in a long line of compromises thats stretched back to when she was 18 and first saw that pink line form on the little stick she had just peed on. She had grown used to feeling both too young and too old for the life she was leading. She had found over the years that a person could get used to anything, if they really had to.

 

It was that night, her seventh in a row of babysitting for Bo and Cheyenne, that she decided to hit up Taco Bell on her way home. No particular reason, just filling a craving, something she did a lot more than she used to. Back when time was a much more reliable concept, and there seemed to be more pressing urges than a desire for a crunch wrap supreme at 10 PM.

 

Amy had repeated the day often enough that even traffic had become scripted for her. Her commute to work took her half the time it usually did since she knew how to hit every green light on her way to the store. But this was an unbeaten path for her, as she swung into the Taco Bell nearer to Cheyenne’s apartment than her own condo. 

 

An otherwise unremarkable deviation from her normal routine, if not for the fact that it meant that Amy was unaware of the large pickup truck nearby being driven by a man who’d had maybe two beers more than he had planned to at his after-work happy hour. Not enough that he swerving blindly in and out of his lane, or running red lights because his brain could have sworn they were actually green. But enough that his eyes were more than happy to slide distractedly over to his phone, hoping to see a text from Annie, the new secretary at his office that he’d spent most of the night flirting with heavily. 

 

The sober version of this man was much more disciplined when it came to ignoring his phone while driving, refusing to even check it at stoplights lest he end up being the asshole who doesn’t notice the signal has changed as traffic backs up behind him. But the two-beers-too-many version wasn’t thinking about common courtesies or road safety. He was thinking of how nice Annie had looked in the pink sweater and tweed pencil skirt she had worn to work and the bar that day, and wondering if she was the type of girl who would be wearing pink panties to match that neat little sweater. Sober him would have felt an appropriate amount of shame and disgust for the thought, Annie was such a nice girl after all, but the Budweiser swishing back and forth in his stomach and, more importantly, his bloodstream, didn’t feel much shame at all.

 

On every other Tuesday the 24th, and there had been many more of those than this man would ever be aware of, he made it home without incident. He kicks off his shoes and crawls into bed fully dressed. He gives some consideration to the idea jerking off, a blurry image of Annie filling his mind, but he’s asleep before it can solidify. It’s likely he would wake the next morning, should that next morning ever come, feeling like death warmed over and filled with a fair amount of the shame that he had been so immune to on his ill advised drive home the night before. 

 

But on this Tuesday night, he doesn’t make it home. He doesn’t notice Amy pulling out of the drive thru exit coming up on his right. How could he notice, when he was busy opening up Instagram, curious to see if Annie had posted the group shot of their work friend yet, which he'd used as an excuse to slide an arm around her waist and pull her in close while the bartender taking the picture counted down three, two, one. And so he also didn’t realize that, while the light before him was yellow and he could make it through the intersection with no problem (after all, most Tuesday nights he did just that), Amy was an overly cautious driver, and had pulled in front of him just in time to stop at the yellow light rather than pass through.

 

He hit the back of her car going 45 MPH. On it’s own, it would have been enough to give her whiplash and a decent concussion as her head pinballed back from the expanding airbag and into her headrest. She would have felt no worse for the wear when she awoke the next morning, the crash amounting to as much as her credit card bill and calorie packed breakfasts. In other words, nothing at all.

 

Instead, her car was pushed out into the intersection, now solidly red in her direction. The last thing she saw was headlights of a minivan, half a second before they plowed their way into her driver’s side door. There was no telling what her last thought was, because there was simply no time for it to form.

 

And that was how Amy Sosa died, the first time.


	5. Winona Goddamn Ryder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter took a while. Writer's block and eating my weight in turkey and pie this week took its toll. 
> 
> A big thank you the reviewers who lent a couple of useful phrases to this chapter.
> 
> And as usual, Good Place references abound.

Jonah alternated between ringing the bell and pounding on Amy’s door before finally giving up and digging the key out from it’s hidey-hole beneath the small frog statue on her front stoop. He was fairly certain she was home, as her car was in the driveway and he could see dim light coming from her upstairs bedroom window. 

 

He told himself that the five minutes of knocking had been a polite courtesy, a heads up in case she was naked or in the middle of something she wouldn’t want anyone barging in on. But in the back of his mind a thought was growing that he didn’t want to acknowledge, lest it grow from a thought into an idea and then perhaps, worst of all, into a belief. That thought, still not entirely concrete in his mind, more of a feeling really, was that maybe he had waited so long to go inside because he really didn’t want to go in at all. Maybe if he just stayed out there long enough, Amy would finally relent and answer the door. Or maybe she wouldn’t, because she wasn’t actually home. Maybe she was out with a friend who had picked her up, or they’d caught an Uber somewhere, leaving Amy’s car behind and a few lights on in the house to deter burglars. 

 

Either way, that feeling in his mind (and now he could maybe feel it in his gut too) was telling him that outside was good. Outside was for the best. Outside the door there were possibilities, whereas inside the door was a definitive answer, and it was one he might not like. Schrodinger’s Amy, if you please.

 

He smothered the thought, which by now was creeping dangerously close to idea territory, shoved the key into the lock, and turned it. He had, after all, volunteered to do this. When Amy hadn’t called in that morning, instead just not showing up for her shift at all, Glenn had been confused, Dina furious, and Jonah a little surprised. It wasn’t like her to just not show up. She tended to request important days off at least a month in advance, and she had a habit of coming into work with anything short of the flu, though she’d be the first to admit that was more due to financial need than personal work ethic. 

 

He found it even stranger when Glenn mentioned he’d tried to call her maybe half a dozen times before lunch, but she wasn't picking up. Amy wasn’t the type to be glued to her phone at all times, but he knew she was pretty fanatical about keeping it charged with the ringer on in case Emma needed to reach her. Strange upgraded itself to concerning when he tried giving her a call on his lunch break and found himself directed to her voicemail after a minute of unanswered rings. If she were just playing hooky for the day,it would make sense to not take a call from Glenn, but there was no reason he could think of why she might screen his calls as well.

 

When he’d gone to clock out for the day, he overheard Glenn asking Dinah if maybe one of them should stop by Amy’s house on their way home, just to make sure she was okay.

 

“Catch her in the act you mean? Oh yeah, I’m game. I love catching people committing fraud. It’s the closest you can get to hunting without actually killing anything,” Dinah replied with a little too much enthusiasm.

 

“What? Jeez, no, not like that,” Glenn insisted, wondering briefly how Dinah could be carrying his child when he sometimes doubted they were even of the same species. “I just meant that something might be wrong, and no one’s going to know if we just keep calling.”

 

“I’ll go,” Jonah offered, inserting himself into their conversation.

 

“You don’t mind?” Glenn asked.

 

“No, it’s fine, her place is on the way to my apartment.” It wasn’t. In fact it was almost 12 miles in the opposite direction, but Glenn didn’t need to know that.

 

“Oh thank goodness,” Glenn let out breath of relief. “I have to pick up Jerusha from her quilting group, but I hated the idea of Amy stuck in her bathtub, like that old lady from the Life Alert commercials.”

 

Jonah opened his mouth to point out that Amy was 33, not 93, but decided against it. As usual, Glenn’s heart was in the right place, regardless of the strange places his mind seemed to wander.

 

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Jonah reassured him as he shrugged on his jacket. 

 

Dinah jabbed an authoritarian finger in his direction. “If she’s not on death’s door, I want you to film her for evidence. Just enough to show she’s mobile and able bodied, nothing wrong that could have prevented her from working today. It’d be even better if you can trick her into admitting her ploy out loud. Just casually work it into conversation, don’t force it.”

 

“Yeah, I’m not going to do any of that.” He turned back to Glenn and patted him on the shoulder. “Seriously, I’m sure it’s nothing. She probably just caught a bug and is sleeping it off.”

 

“Could be a hangover she’s sleeping off instead,” Dinah suggested.

 

“Because Amy’s really been hitting the sauce pretty hard lately,” Jonah replied sarcastically, offended on Amy’s behalf.

 

Dinah threw up her arms. “Hey man, we all know her marriage is falling apart. She wouldn’t be the first women to turn to the bottle in the midst of a romantic crisis. I’m just saying that if she’s going to become an alcoholic, she should at least become a functioning one. Like Sal, or Elias.”

 

“Elias, really?” Glenn asked disbelievingly.

 

“Exactly,” she replied triumphantly, her point made.

 

Jonah shook his head, and decided the only way out of the conversation was surrender. Thirty minutes later and there he was, key in the lock of Amy’s front door and what felt like a boulder sized knot of worry laying heavy in his stomach. He swallowed, and forced himself to push the door open.

 

“Amy?” he called out tentatively. He realized she probably couldn’t have heard him even if she’d been in the next room over. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Amy? It’s Jonah, from work!” 

 

_ Jonah from work, what other Jonah would you be for Christ’s sake, _ he chastised himself.

 

He strained his ears for the sounds of anyone, anyone living at least, coming from upstairs. He was met with silence. He muttered a curse under his breath, and made for the staircase to the second floor and Amy’s bedroom.

 

“Amy?” he tried once more when he reached the top landing, and could see her door was cracked open. Soft light filtered out into the hallway from her bedside lamp. “Hey Amy, I just stopped by to see if you were alright. You didn’t come into work today and you weren’t answering your phone. I volunteered to make sure you weren’t dead.” He tried to make that last part sound like a joke, but cringed at the sound of worry that had clearly leaked into his voice. Still no response. He moved towards her bedroom. 

 

He reached out to the door and wrapped his knuckles on it lightly. He waited a beat for a response that he didn’t think would come and when his suspicion proved correct, he gently nudged it open. He could see Amy laying in bed, covers drawn up to her neck, eyes open to the ceiling. He took a few tentative steps forward, looking for any sign of recognition that he was there. He reached the edge of her bed and, for a brief moment, he was positive his joke had turned out to be true. Until she opened her mouth and, ironically enough, declared, “I died.”

 

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Jonah jumped a foot in the air, startled at the voice coming from what he had briefly believed to be a corpse. He could feel his heart pounding in his throat, and tried to take a deep breath to steady himself. “Not cool Amy! You had, like, ten different chances to say something before I got up here. I seriously thought you were dead!”

 

“I was,” she replied hollowly. 

 

Jonah’s brows drew together in confusion, trying to put her words in a context that would make sense. 

 

“What? You mean you’re dying? Like your sick? Do you need me to call someone, take you to the urgent care?”

 

She heaved a large sigh, tossed off the covers, and pulled herself up into a sitting position.

 

“No, Jonah. I’m not  _ dying _ , I  _ died _ .”

 

He stared at her blankly. “Ames, I’m sure that what you’re saying makes perfect sense to you, but I’ve got no idea what that means.”

 

She rubbed her eyes wearily, realizing that in her morbid haze she had skipped an important step in the conversation.

 

“You’re right, sorry. Let me catch you up. I am stuck in a real life version of Groundhog Day. I wake up everyday and it’s always Tuesday, October 24th, and it has been for almost a year. You’re the only person I’ve ever told, and you always believe me, but sometimes it takes an annoyingly long time time to get you to believe me, so you sort of gave me a cheat code to use.”

 

“What the fu-” he began, but she held a finger to silence him.

 

“Let me finish, this is actually my first time trying this out, not sure how it’s going to play. You lost your virginity to Sara Aronofsky at Jewish sleep away camp. You were sixteen, manischewitz wine was involved, as were some rug burns I assume, and you’ve never told anyone. Except me, obviously.”

 

Jonah’s mouth hung open in disbelief. His mind wasn’t sure which part it should try to process first, and had defaulted to blank in the meantime. 

 

“That’s...that’s not-. No. I never…no.”

 

“This isn’t helping as much as you said it would,” Amy noted dryly, more to herself than to Jonah. “You need more evidence? Fine. How about the fact that I know your parents are both therapists, you have the most boring breakfast order in the world, and you own Groundhog Day on DVD? The first time you ever decided to believe me, you said it was because of some Sherlock Holmes process of elimination type shit. So please, close your mouth, think for a second, and ask yourself if you can think of a single reasonable explanation for how I know all that stuff other than the one I’ve already given you.”

 

Despite maintaining an expression of utter bewilderment, he did as she requested. He stood silent for almost two minutes straight, deep in thought and apparently oblivious to Amy’s growing impatience.

 

“Well?” she finally prompted him.

 

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, not unlike Sherlock Holmes pondering a clue. Finally, he spoke.

 

“Yeah, okay.” He sounded more like he was agreeing on a place to eat lunch than he was acknowledging a reality challenging event. All things considered Amy found the reaction rather underwhelming.

 

“Really?” 

 

“The next most logical explanation involves you randomly becoming pen pals with Sara when you were a teenager, so yeah. I believe you. Your...well more like  _ my _ cheat code works, I guess. Bully for me.” He didn’t sound enthused by the idea, but at least the confusion and mild panic had left his voice. “So, what’s this about you dying?”

 

The question brought Amy abruptly back into her present mortality crisis, the crisis being that mortality was no longer an much of a an issue for her at all.

 

“Oh yeah...that. So you remember the part in the movie where Phil drives off the cliff, and the truck explodes, and then he just wakes up that morning again, totally fine?”

 

“Uh huh.”

 

“Well,” she spread her arms out like a magician revealing a trick, minus the cry of ‘ta-da!’. 

 

“You drove off a cliff? Where did you even find a cliff around here?” Jonah’s voice was lacking the sympathy she had come to expect from him given their previous interactions about her problems.

 

“No I didn’t drive off a cliff! That’s not really the detail I thought you would focus on.”

 

He held up his hands in a motion of surrender. “Well pardon me for wanting to get particular about how you died. I’ve never met anyone who’s come back from the dead before, how many chances am I ever going to get to ask this sort of thing?”

 

“Honestly, more than you’ll probably ever know,” she replied somberly.

 

His eyes narrowed. “What, are you about to completely follow in the movie’s footsteps and start killing yourself a thousand times in a thousand different ways just because you can?”

 

“What? I - no, I don’t think so. I mean...no. Of course not!” Amy huffed. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t given that part of the movie some thought as well, but given how poorly she was coping with having died once, she wasn’t quite ready to consider the possibility of doing it again, let alone a hundred times over.

 

“Well then don’t say shit like that,” Jonah shot back, and Amy was surprised to hear the annoyance in his voice, and how closely it bordered on anger.

 

“Hold up, are you pissed at me for dying? That’s not a thing you get to be angry about.”

 

“No, I’m not pissed at you for dying, I’m pissed at you for making me spend all of today thinking you were dead, only to turn up here and find out that you’re basically Winona goddamn Ryder in Beetlejuice holding a funeral for yourself here in your own bedroom.” Out of nowhere, he jabbed a finger into her shoulder.

 

“Ouch! What the hell was that for?!” 

 

“Did you feel that?”

 

“Of course I felt it, you poked me!”

 

“If you felt it then you’re alive, right?” He didn’t give her a chance to respond. “You died, but you’re not dead. There’s a difference. Now I’m here for you, and I’m here for this conversation, but I’m not here to talk about the possibility of you dying again just because you can.”

 

Amy found herself momentarily speechless at his outburst. She wasn’t acquainted the Mr. and Mrs. Simms, but she doubted this was any kind of approved therapeutic approach Jonah had learned from them. 

 

“I’m not about to throw myself in front a bus just for shits and giggles,” she said defensively. “But I died once on accident, and I’m sure it can happen again.”

 

Jonah’s expression softened a little. “You’re probably right. That’s a very a real possibility and it sucks and I’m sorry. But do me a favor, okay? The next time it happens, if it does happen again, pause the funeral long enough to pick up your damn phone.”

 

Amy, looking a little embarrassed, mumbled something under her breath.

 

“Sorry, what was that?” asked Jonah.

 

She sighed. “I said okay. Next time this happens, God forbid, yadda yadda yadda, I will drag myself out of the pity party long enough to let someone know that I’m not actually dead. I’m sorry.”

 

“That’s all I’m asking for,” he replied, appearing mollified and ignoring the sarcastic ‘yaddas’ she’d peppered into the apology. “Now, and I’m genuinely asking this time, how exactly did you die?”

 

Amy leaned back against her headboard. “Your first guess was actually pretty close, it was a car crash. Just not off a cliff.”

 

“Where?”

 

“An intersection on Manchester, near Woodlawn.”

 

“What the hell were you doing all the way down there?”

 

“I was dropping Harmonica back off at Cheyenne’s place. I babysat that night so they could celebrate their anniversary.”

 

“Well that was nice of you,” Jonah remarked mildly.

 

“I thought so too, which is why I decided to reward myself with some Taco Bell. I stop at a light that’s about to turn red and go to dig into my food, and a truck comes up behind me with a very different idea. Pushes me into the intersection where I meet my fate at the front end of a minivan. So there. That’s how I died.”

 

“A minivan?” he repeated.

 

“Yup.”

 

“You got killed by a soccer mom?”

 

“You know I really didn’t get a good look, what with the whole dying thing, but I think we can safely assume it was probably a soccer mom. There might have even been one of those stick figure families on the back window.”

 

Jonah let out a long huff of air and dropped himself down on the foot of the bed. “What a shitty way to go,” he declared.

 

“Yeah I’m not exactly thrilled about it. But also, is there really a good way to go? Like, other than peacefully drifting off at a hundred and five years old with Chris Hemsworth on top of you?”

 

Jonah did a double take, looking at her with mild reproach. “My ideal death does not involve Chris Hemsworth in any way.”

 

“You’re more of Liam guy?” she replied, and actually managed to hold a straight face for all of five seconds. She dissolved into a tear inducing peal of laughter, and didn’t have time to react as Jonah whacked her with one of her own throw pillows, though he was now laughing as well. She grabbed it and chucked it back at him as her giggles began to subside.

 

“What the hell has gotten into you?” Jonah asked, his tone light but a little confused.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I mean one minute you’re basically hosting your own solo wake and ruminating over the next time you might die, and the next you’re cracking jokes. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely like one more than the other, but it’s kind of giving me whiplash.”

 

Amy shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to feel right now. Do you have any idea how many books there are about dying, or about preparing for death? There are whole websites and chat rooms dedicated to people with terminal illnesses, and helping them cope with the inevitability of their fates. And that’s great, but none of that really applies to me does it? No one out there is answering questions about what to do  _ after _ you die, because who there’s no one around that needs to read that book.”

 

“I never would have thought of that,” Jonah conceded. “So forget about how you’re  _ supposed _ to feel right now. What do you  _ actually _ feel right now?”

 

Amy leaned forward, rested her chin in one hand, and gave the question some thought. “Well, scared, I guess. Scared of it happening again. Scared that it’s going to keep happening with no particular effect on my whole repeating days thing. And weirdly giddy too. There’s something pretty freeing about not having to be scared of dying, about dying literally not even being on the menu anymore. I’ve never felt more tired or more awake. And…” she trailed off, searching for the right word. “Disappointed, I guess? Yeah...yeah, disappointed.”

 

“In what?”

 

“In the fact that I went through all the trouble of dying and I still have no idea if there’s an afterlife. Like, that should be the one perk of dying: getting a final answer. Finally getting to see the man behind the giant curtain.”   
  
“I don’t know if that’s the best metaphor here. The man behind the curtain ended up being a con artist.”

 

“Well I’m feeling pretty conned out of an afterlife right now, so I think the metaphor works just fine.”

 

“Fair enough.” Jonah toed off his shoes and crawled up on to the bed next to Amy. He pulled the heavy throw that was folded at the end of the bed and tossed it over the both of them. 

 

“Uhhh, Jonah? What the hell are you doing?” She was looking at him like he’d sprouted a second head.

 

“Just getting comfortable, don’t be weird about it.”

 

“Don’t be weird...you’re the one turning this into a sleepover.”

 

“You’ve had an emotionally exhausting day, and so have I. You died and you didn’t get a light at the end of the tunnel, and that’s upsetting. I spent the day thinking something terrible had happened to you, which I guess technically something did, and I thought you were a corpse when I walked through that door. So maybe we can just cut each other some slack, okay?”

 

Her eyes softened a bit, and she remembered all the reasons why he was the only person she could ever talk about her situation. The only person she ever  _ wanted _ to talk to about it.

 

“Okay,” she replied quietly. “I’m sorry I let you think I was dead.”

 

He smiled at her wanly. “I’m sorry you died.”

 

She snorted at the absurdity of his statement, well-meaning as it had been. She fell back against her pillows. “What a weird fucking day.”

 

“Coming from you that’s really saying something.”

 

“No shit. So what now?” she asked.

 

He looked at her, brows knit together in confusion. “Why are you asking me?”

 

“Because this is the part you’re really good at. You come up with some new idea for me to try, some new method of self-improvement. Anything you can think of to get me out of this goddamn loop.”

 

“I must not be that good at it if nothing I’ve come up with has worked,” he noted reasonably.

 

“That’s not the point,” Amy said, trying not to sound annoyed. “I need to keep trying something, anything. If it doesn’t work, fine, I cross it off the list, but I can’t just do nothing.”

 

Jonah considered that. “Well...why not?” he finally asked.

 

“Why not what?”

 

“Why not just do nothing?”

 

“What, like not even try to get myself out of this thing? Just lay in bed all day and accept my fate? I did that today, it doesn’t feel too great.”

 

“I mean, not literally do nothing. But what if you’re so focused on wanting out of the loop that it’s blinding you to the very thing that could get you out of it?”

 

“And that thing would be?”

 

“No idea,” he admitted. “But that was kind of the whole point of the movie. I mean sure, Phil becomes a better person and that makes him worthy of Rita and eventually gets him out of his loop, but he doesn’t actually reach that point until he stops caring about the loop entirely.”

 

Amy shook her head, clearly unswayed by the argument. “We’ve talked about this before. I said that doing good things wouldn’t count if my motivation was just to get out of the loop, and you said it shouldn’t matter, that putting good out into the world is still the right thing to do, even if I’m doing it for selfish reasons. Now you’re arguing my point and I’m arguing yours, and honestly it's giving me a headache.”

 

“I’m not talking about good deeds or bad right now. This isn’t about some cosmic accountant keeping tally of your life until you tip the scales enough to free yourself. At least I don’t think it is, who knows. There’s more to life than that, and I think you’re missing out on in it by focusing so much on the loop.”

 

“Well shit Jonah, what else am I supposed to focus on?” She sounded more tired than angry. “I don’t age, I’m functionally immortal, but at the end of the day I’m still stuck being me. It’s like being a really crap superhero. I don’t even rate the Spider-Man ‘great power, great responsibility’ speech because it’s a terrible power with virtually no responsibility at all. But yeah, I’ll just forget all about that and carry on hamster-wheeling through existence.”

 

“Of course you want out of this thing, but is that really the only thing you want in life? If you woke up tomorrow, and it actually was tomorrow, what would you do?”

 

She thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’d enjoy a day of not knowing what was going to happen, I guess.”

 

Jonah almost looked disappointed by her answer. “There’s really nothing else you want, nothing you’d want to do? Not just for a day. I’m talking about your life.”

 

“If I knew what I was doing with my life, would I still be at Cloud 9?”

 

He shook his head. “You’re more than your job Ames. That’s not your life.”

 

“Well it sure feels that way sometimes.”

 

He nodded, familiar with the feeling himself. “Look, if you want my advice, which despite my track record you still seem to, you’re never going to break the loop unless you actually find something worth breaking it for. You can’t just want out for the sake of being out.”

 

“And that will break this thing?”

 

“Hell if I know. I just...I just want better for you, and I want you to want better for yourself too.” He held her gaze, and the sincerity she saw in his eye twisted her stomach in the strangest way.

 

“Why?” she asked softly.

 

“Why what?”

 

“Why do you care so much what happens to me?”

 

He smiled a little, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You really have to ask?”


	6. Literally Nicole Kidman

Amy woke up alone. She always did, as a rule, but this was the first time she’d had reason to think she might not, and the image of an undisturbed pillow at her side left a hollow feeling in her stomach.

 

She and Jonah had fallen asleep in her bed the night before. It wasn’t planned, and he’d even made a few halfhearted comments about how late it was getting and how she probably wanted him out of her hair, but she’d ignored them all. Their conversation had fallen away from topics of morality and mortality, and into the far more interesting territory of ‘the contents of Dina’s medicine cabinet’ (answer: an unsettling variety of personal lubricants), and ‘worst excuses to call out of work that Glenn has actually believed’ (answer: had to take Emma’s pet rabbit for a pap smear).

 

“He seriously bought that?” Jonah had asked, refusing to believe that Glenn could be quite that clueless.

 

“I don’t know if he registered anything else I said past the words ‘pap smear’. He gets really weird when it comes to anything involving our, you know.” She waved a hand in the general direction of her crotch.

 

Jonah had thought about it for a moment before nodding in agreement. “Yeah, that’s actually pretty on brand for him.”

 

She remembered fighting to keep her eyelids open, but it was so hard. Closing them meant a reset. No matter how much she hoped it wouldn’t, the cynic in her head had played back the scene from the movie where Rita stayed with Phil until midnight after an almost perfect day, and Phil had still woken up alone. It hadn’t been a perfect day for Amy, far from it, but there was still a sliver of misguided hope bouncing around in her brain telling her to stay awake. _Just keep your eyes open until Tuesday becomes Wednesday. Keep your eyes on him and he won’t disappear._ But she didn’t, and he had.

 

The first thought that crossed her mind upon waking was actually Jonah’s voice, asking that goddamn question.

 

_Do you really have to ask?_

 

Apparently, she really did. Because she was staring at an empty bed and found herself unable to think of anything but more questions. Questions like  _what the hell does that mean?_ And, _are you implying what I think you’re implying?_ Or, _do I actually think you’re implying anything, or do I just wish you were?_

 

By now Amy was well acquainted with the feeling of spiraling. Hell, she practically had it down to an art form. But this was an uncharted brand of anxiety for her, one that came with - and she couldn’t believe she was actually thinking of this word - hope. Where the hell had that come from? And hope for what? That Jonah loved her? That everything he did for her, every time he was there for her, every time he believed her, every time he supported her, was because he loved her?

 

Those words - do you really have to ask? - certainly reeked of romantic dramedy trope. She was positive she’d heard them spoken by Hugh Grant at some point. Or maybe Colin Firth. Definitely someone British and befuddled and considerably more attractive than they had any right to be. But that didn’t mean that Jonah had meant it in the way that charming British men meant it in movies when they said it to their impossibly attractive waifish female co-stars. This was not Love Actually. It was barely even Groundhogs Day, and if it was, that would make Jonah Andie MacDowell, and Amy didn’t even want to begin to ponder those implications.

 

For the first time in a long time, she found she actually wanted to repeat the day, if only so she could circle back around to Jonah asking her that damned question and replying to him, “Yes, of course I do! What the hell do you mean?!”

 

But as soon as the idea occurred to her, she knew she wouldn’t do it. Part of it was not wanting the guilt of knowingly putting Jonah through another day of thinking she was dead, and the other part was thinking of how she actually wanted to spend her day. That was what Jonah had prompted her to do after all, to start thinking about what she actually wanted from her life. She still wasn’t sure how to answer the long term version of that question, so she settled on the more immediate version. What did she want at that exact moment? The answer turned out to be Jonah and large African mammals.

 

\----

 

She thrust the coffee into his hand as soon as he opened the door.

 

“It’s the kind with caffeine in it,” she answered before the thought of asking what kind of drink it was had even formed in his mind. “I’m coming in.”

 

Jonah barely had time to blink before he found himself staring at an empty doorway as Amy was already settling in on his couch. He turned, closing the door behind him, and began to seriously consider the possibility that he was still dreaming. It made more sense than the idea that any of this was actually happening.

 

“Amy I - ”

 

“Just woke up, I know.” She took a sip from her own cup, and gave him a patient smile.

 

“Uh-huh, that. I’m not really sure what you’re doing here this early, but we don’t have to be at work for a couple of hours. I was kind of hoping to spend some of that time still asleep so…” he trailed off, hoping she would fill in the gap with an explanation that both justified waking him up and offered the possibility of him going back to bed.

 

“Good news, bad news. Bad news is you’re not going to be going back to sleep. Good news is you’re not going into work either.”

 

“I’m not?” He dropped down in the beat up avocado green recliner facing Amy. He’d had it since college, where he’d tried to pass it off as deco-chic in his freshman dorm. Age and humility finally allowed him to admit to himself that thing was uglier than sin, but it was comfortably worn in in all the right places and he was too broke to justify replacing it. “May I ask why?”

 

“Because you got hit by a car,” Amy replied matter-of-factly, as though he had just asked her for the time.

 

“I did?”

 

“Well no, obviously not. But that’s what I told Glenn.”

 

He nodded and sipped at his drink, before her words actually registered in his mind, triggering a coughing fit that sent hot coffee out through his nose. He furiously wiped at his face with his own shirt, and fixed her with an outraged glare.

 

“You did _what_?!”

 

“That was a bit dramatic, but okay, I admit what I said didn’t sound great. I told Glenn that we were meeting up for breakfast and that someone backed into you in the Waffle House parking lot. Probably nothing broken, but I said I was going to run you over to the hospital to get you checked out just in case and could he possibly find someone to cover out shifts. And because Glenn is, well, Glenn, he said of course. He sends his thoughts and prayers by the way,” she added brightly.  

 

Jonah relaxed slightly, his outrage downgrading to annoyance. “And what about when I go in tomorrow without a scratch on me? Am I go to be faking a limp, or does this coffee come with a pair of crutches?”

 

She waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ she said, knowing that bridge was a lot further off than Jonah knew.

 

Jonah stared at her, an internal debate playing across his face. A couple times he opened his mouth, seemingly prepared to argue with her over what she’d told Glenn or how rudely she’d woken him, only to shake his head and and throw up his hands instead.

 

“Wouldn’t you like to know what we’re going to do instead of going into work?” Amy asked, growing tired of Jonah’s seeming inability to accept her hijacking of his day.

 

“I take it I don’t have a say in the matter?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Of course not, why would I? I’m just the guy who got run over by a car to get us the day off.”

 

“Fake run over by a car, you’re fine. And because if I let you pick what we’re going to do today, I feel like there’s a very good chance of us spending most of it staring at modern art. How far off am I?”

 

Jonah crossed his arms and stared intently at the coffee table. “Well there is a new Basqiuat exhibition at the-”

 

“Hard pass.”

 

Jonah sighed. “Fine, tell me what we’re doing today.”

 

“We’re going to the zoo.”

 

His eyes lit up, Basquiat quickly forgotten. “Why didn’t you say so? I love the zoo. You should have just opened with that.”

 

Amy smiled knowingly. “Noted. Go get dressed. I want to get there in time to watch them feed the elephants breakfast.”

 

\----

 

She didn't know why it had taken her so long to consider spending one of her many Tuesdays at the zoo. It had always been one of her favorite places on Earth, ever since she was a child. For someone who had lived in St. Louis her whole life and, lets be honest now, would probably die there as well, it brought the entire world before her. She would probably never go to Kenya, or Thailand, or Brazil. But for the price of an admission ticket she could still see their hippos and monkeys and brilliant colored birds. Not as good as going there in person, but a million times better than seeing any of them on a screen instead. She kept waiting for the charm to wear off with each year she grew older, but it never did. 

 

Jonah, even with with a semester at sea under his belt, easily matched her enthusiasm, bouncing between exhibits like a kid hopping rides at Disney. Fuck Mickey and Goofy, what were they compared to an actual real life meerkat? 

 

Even in the face of his apparent childlike glee and her own sense of wonder, Amy found herself distracted as they made their way through the park. A nagging voice in the back of her head was insisting that she must have wanted to spend the day with Jonah for good reason, one that had nothing to do with fixing her repeating days. It wasn't enough to acknowledge that Jonah was what she wanted, her subconscious was demanding to know why. 

 

She knew why, but she didn't like the answer. Most days she was spectacularly good at not thinking about the answer. The deeper into her situation got, the less she even had to try. But apparently it hadn't disappeared entirely. It had just bided its time, waiting for a day like this to force itself out in the open.

 

It happened in front of the penguin enclosure.

 

“Did you know that penguins are monogamous?" Jonah asked, not really listening for her answer. "They mate for life. Which is only like six years, but still. Always thought that was kind of cool.”

 

Amy stifled a groan in her throat.

 

“Yeah, that’s super...neat,” she forced out.

 

Jonah caught the strained tone under her words and regarded her curiously.

 

“You okay?”

 

“Me? I’m good. Really good. I signed my divorce papers yesterday, so I’m just, you know, super,” Amy replied, trying to casually work in that last piece of information and failing spectacularly.

 

Jonah turned to face her, clearly taken aback by abrupt change in topic. “Oh shit, are you...I mean, how are you doing?” He concern was clear, but so was his uneasiness with the subject of her marriage.

 

“I don’t know,” she admitted, the false bravado now gone from her voice. “Not as good as I thought, apparently.”

 

“Nothing really prepares you for this sort of thing I guess."

 

"I don't know. Mrs. Doubtfire gave it a pretty good shot."

 

"I just meant that all the other milestones in life are pretty straight forward. Happy at a wedding, sad at a funeral. The best neurosurgeon in the world probably still has one of those charts somewhere in their office where you rank your pain based off the little emoji faces. There's no chart for divorce though.”

 

Amy nodded appreciatively, surprised at how well he’d managed to sum up the awkward post divorce emotional fog she’d spent several months ignoring. “I kind of thought I’d feel like Nicole Kidman.”

 

“Like, one of her characters?”

 

“No, like literally Nicole Kidman. Did you ever see those pictures of her leaving her attorney’s office after signing her divorce papers from Tom Cruise?”

 

“Nope, can’t say that I have.”

 

“She looks like the physical embodiment of the song ‘Walking on Sunshine’.”

 

“And I take it that’s not how you felt?”

 

“Not even a little bit. Which shouldn’t be all that surprising. I mean, Adam wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t Tom Cruise either.”

 

“I thought you guys were still giving marriage counseling a try?”

 

“We were, for a while. I don’t really know how much it helped. We were being nicer to each other at home, but the biggest problem in our marriage was never that Adam wasn’t a nice. Turns out being a nice guy and a shitty partner are not mutually exclusive.”

 

“So I take it you’re the one who called it then?”

 

“I pulled the trigger, but I think we both knew it was time. We were supposed to have an appointment the first week of September, and I remember I spending all day hoping that I would get a really bad headache or maybe food poisoning, anything that was a good enough excuse to ditch it. I actually tried to will myself into being sick. I think that’s when it hit me, that I’d rather spend a day feeling physically ill than spend an hour working on my marriage. There’s really no coming back from that is there?”

 

Jonah took the question as rhetorical and remained silent. He tentatively placed his arm along the back of the bench, not quite behind Amy, but close enough for her to take the offer of comfort if she wanted to. She gave him a small smile and leaned in, her body collapsing lightly against his own, her head resting on his shoulder.

 

“I’ve never told you that before,’ she said, barely loud enough for Jonah to hear.

 

“Of course you haven’t,” he replied gently. “It only happened yesterday. It’s not something I would expect you to text me a live action play by play of.”

 

She’d almost forgotten. He didn’t know this time, because she hadn’t bother to tell him. She’d meant to, it was practically routine by now, but the moment never really presented itself. They’d been having such a nice day. The conversation had flowed easily and casually. It had just never drifted towards any topic that lent itself to discussing the nature of time and the accepted realities of the universe. Where do you work that in, between the gorillas and the polar bears?

 

She opened her mouth, ready to begin the process. The preamble plea to keep an open mind, Sara and the bottle of wine, the disbelief, and finally the acceptance. Always the acceptance. But she stopped herself, unable to go through with it. She knew he would believe her (didn’t he always), but that would be the end of her almost normal day. Not that post divorce sympathy cuddling in front of penguins was by any means a normal day for her, but it was the first day in a long time that she wasn’t completely focused on the idea of eternity.

 

She hadn’t really spared it a thought since Jonah had caved and gotten into her car. That had been what, almost four hours ago? When was the last time she’d made it that long without thinking about her problem, not counting the hours she’d thrown away to movies and TV?

 

“Feels like it’s been a lot longer than that,” she replied, and he didn’t press her further.

 

She could feel his thumb lightly tracing back and forth along the top of her shoulder, and the silence they slipped into was surprisingly comfortable. Amy allowed her mind to drift over to the penguins, wondering if with enough time she could pick out the the ones that were paired off. For life, if Jonah had his facts right. She found herself smiling at the idea that if you were to draw up a list of all the things that penguins were better at than humans, immediately following _fishing_ and _swimming_ would be _committed, monogamous relationships_.

 

“Can I ask you a question?” Jonah’s voice broke her from her contemplation of the little tuxedoed birds.

 

“Sure.”

 

“If you signed your divorce papers yesterday, that would technically make today your first full day as a single person in over fifteen years, right?”

 

_First or hundredth, or thousandth_ , she thought to herself. _I probably should have been keeping track_.

 

“Yup. Single. Alone. A real milestone,” she added sarcastically. “What’s your actual question?”

 

“That was my question.”

 

“No, that was the question you already knew the answer to, the one you asked so you can segue more comfortably into your actual question.”

 

He looked mildly offended at having been called out so accurately, but didn’t bother to dispute her point.

 

“I know you Jonah, it’s fine. Ask what you want to ask.”

 

He pulled his arm back from around her shoulders and folded his hands in his lap. His thumbs began to twiddle together nervously. “It’s kind of a selfish question, so fair warning there I guess.”

 

She said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

 

“It’s just...this is your first day of freedom from a marriage that you never would have been in if you hadn’t gotten pregnant. Fifteen years with your life on hold while you tried to keep everything afloat with a partner who could barely doggy paddle. And whether that’s a terrifying prospect for you or a really exciting one, that still makes today a pretty big deal. Like when people say ‘this is the first day of the rest of your life’, this is the kind of thing they’re talking about. Am I wrong?”

 

“You’re not,” she replied, feeling a small rush of excitement at not knowing what Jonah was about to say, as she’d never allowed them to have this conversation before. “It’s the kind of day Shania Twain would write a feminist power anthem about. But that’s not your question either.”

 

He took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay, here it goes: why are you spending it with me?”

 

“Excuse me?” She honestly didn’t know what to expect him to ask, but it certainly hadn’t been that.

 

“I’m serious,” he insisted. “I would get it if you had called out of work and spent the day holed up under a pile of blankets. Or if you went out and got blackout drunk, maybe take home a college freshman. Or even if you had come into work and tried to just have as normal a day as you possibly could. But instead, you faked a medical emergency to get me out of work and wander around the St. Louis Zoo together. Why?”

 

“You really think I could pull a college freshman?”

 

“Amy!”

 

“Chill, let me take compliment,” she tried not to laugh. She wanted to undercut the tension, not his sincerity. “What’s so bad about spending the day like this? How is this any better or worse than drinking my feelings or spiraling into a depression?

 

“Nothing,” he conceded. “There’s nothing wrong with spending the day like this. I’m not assigning a value here, I’m just asking why.”

 

“Because I wanted to,” she insisted with more force than she’d intended. “I thought of a thousand different ways I could spend this day, and more than half of them involved you, okay? You asked me what I wanted, well this is what -” Her words we cut off by Jonah’s mouth slamming into hers. His hands buried themselves in her hair, and his movements lacked any of the hesitancy his words had only moments ago. She had just enough time to realize that she should probably be doing something with her hands, as they were sitting rather uselessly in her lap, when he pulled away.

 

He left a hand cupped lightly behind her neck, and his faced was etched with uncertainty. “Did I misread that?”

 

“Misread what?” she heard herself ask.

 

“The moment. You were talking about what you wanted and it sounded like you wanted…” he trailed off. “I did misread it, didn’t I? Can you just give me, like, a ballpark figure on how bad I just fucked this up?”

 

She felt removed from her body and hyper aware of it at the same time. She could feel where his lips had pressed into her own, the force with which they had done so. She could feel the tips of his fingers resting on her neck, holding her face towards his with the lightest pressure. But she could also see them the way a casual observer might see them as they walked by. A guy in plaid shirt and too tight pants staring at intently at a woman with wide-set brown eyes and a mop of hair that she hadn’t bothered to wash that morning. Someone might have assumed the two were a couple. Given how they were looking at each other, they may have even assumed they were in love. It would have been a fair assumption.

 

She gave a small shake of her head. “No,” she told him, her voice low. “You didn’t misread it.” This time she leaned in first. She saw the tension in his face melt into relief, and felt his lips curling up into a smile as she pressed them with her own. Her hands, in an effort to be slightly less useless than before, reached up and cupped either side of his face. The force that had been there before was absent this time, a side effect of knowing they were leaning into something together, instead of one of them blindly jumping off an emotional cliff and hoping for a safe landing.

 

Jonah pulled back, and something in the way he looked at her killed Amy, just a little.

 

“You know, that wasn’t what I asked you,” he said softly.

 

“What do you mean?” Amy replied, confused.

 

“Before. I asked why you wanted to spend the day with me, not what you want-”

 

She cut him off with another kiss. She’d meant it to be a short one, just to silence him and save herself from having to explain herself, but it went on, as things like that are wont to do. They broke apart, both having enough sense to stop shy of slipping into actual foreplay in front of the penguin exhibit. It had been a long time since she’d had a first kiss, but Amy was sure they didn’t get much better than this one.

 

And then a thought occurred to her that twisted her stomach painfully. She realized that this might be the first of many first kisses between them. At least, they’d always be the first to Jonah and that idea brought her no joy.

 

_Not fair_ , she thought to herself. _Not fucking fair._

 

She wanted plenty more kisses from him, but she wanted this to be the only first one. In front of the penguins, at her favorite place in the world with her favorite person in the world. Anyone else, anyone leading a normal life that is, might want to be able to relive a moment like this. Rewind it, play it back, experience it all over again. Amy had they ability to do exactly that, and that fact only made her want to throw up. Or cry. Maybe both.

 

Jonah must have noticed the joy from only moments before slipping from her face. He cupped a hand under her chin and looked at her, worry in his eyes.

 

“You okay?”

 

Amy nodded, then changed her mind and shook her head.

 

“Too much tongue?” he asked with seemingly dire sincerity. She laughed despite herself, and felt her stomach uncoil slightly.

 

“No,” she assured him. “Nothing to like that.”

 

“What is it then? You can tell me. You can tell me anything.”

 

“I know that,” she replied. _More than you know_. “It’s just...I have this terrible feeling that I’m going to have to pay for this. All of it.”

 

Jonah pushed her hair back from her face and tucked it gently behind her ear. “I’m not really sure what that means Ames.”

 

She shook her head, not sure she knew what she meant either. “Doesn’t matter.”

 

“I don’t know, sounds important to me. Is there anything I can do?”

 

She stared at him calmly, a million thoughts on the tip of her tongue. She settled on one, and smiled.

 

“Take me home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're nearing the end. Thanks for hanging in there.


	7. Distinct and Unavoidable Consequences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end. And I have no good excuses for having taken this long to get here beyond debilitating writer's block, a brief trip out of the country, and the fact that I actually started reading again with kind of fervor I haven't experienced since I was a middle schooler with a steady allowance and her own Barnes and Noble membership.
> 
> So thank you to every person who left a kudos, or wrote a review, or pleaded with me to finish the story.
> 
> Just two more things:  
> 1) Go watch Russian Doll on Netflix, it does more beautiful and creative things with this trope than I could ever dream of  
> 2)Yes, there is one last Good Place reference tucked in here (anyone else have their heart shattered by that finale? Not just me right?)

“So what happens now?” he asked.

 

Amy grabbed a bottle of water off her nightstand and took a long pull from it. “I don’t know,” she replied, wiping the back of her hand across her lips. “I was gonna pee, take a quick shower, and then maybe we can try for round three?”

 

Round one had started as soon as the front door had closed behind them, and had resulted in an almost absurdly cliche trail of clothes leading from the bottom of the stairs all the way up to Amy’s bed. Even though only a couple of hours had passed, Amy could really only remember flashes of it. Every movement had been a little too fast, a little too desperate. Four years of tension wasn’t meant to be squeezed into only a few minutes of connection, but damned if they hadn’t tried. It had ended with Jonah panting and trying to stop himself from collapsing all of his weight down on Amy.

 

“Just gimme a minute too catch my breath,” his voice had asked from where his face was buried in her neck. “I can do better.”

 

And he had. Round two was carried out as though they had all the time in the world, the irony of which was not lost on Amy. Jonah’s hands had moved like he was going to recreate a topographical map of her later on, and he wanted to commit every detail to memory. He figured out where she liked to be kissed, where she liked to be grabbed, and where she was too ticklish for any amount of horniness to prevent her from laughing. 

 

That had been new for her. Well, sex with anyone who wasn’t Adam was all technically new to her, but the laughing in particular. Somehow it had almost felt obscene, to be naked and vulnerable and so thoroughly exposed to someone, and to have them choose that moment to try to make her laugh, to make her smile. She’d spent fifteen years having the kind of sex where every moment or action was geared towards one of them, usually Adam, getting off. And here was Jonah, blowing a raspberry on her hip just to hear her shriek and feel her squirm beneath him.

 

For the life of her she couldn’t understand how that sort of thing never made it into any of the romance novels she’d skimmed through while stocking Cloud 9’s small selection of books and magazines. They were full of passionate embraces and throbbing members and men with the kind of stamina that would put most marathon runners to shame, but they all had a distinct lack of laughter in them. She decided that it might have been the most intimate thing she’d ever experienced. Wonders never cease.

 

She felt Jonah’s hand grab at her wrist and lightly tug her back down into bed. He pulled her back into him, wrapping an arm around her waist and burying his face in her hair for a moment.

 

“Stay,” she heard him mutter from behind her. “Just for a little bit.”

 

“Fine,” she sighed. “But if I get a UTI I’m blaming you.”

 

“And they say romance is dead.” 

 

A comfortable silence fell between them, and if it weren’t for the distracting feeling of his fingers tracing patterns on her hip she might have dozed off. 

 

“So how long have you been in love with me?” he asked quietly.

 

Amy jolted upright, now entirely awake, and looked at him through narrowed eyes.

 

“Who said I was in love with you?” she replied, her defenses up.

 

“Seriously?” he gestured at their bodies, the rumpled sheets, the lamp where her panties had ended up hanging from in their mutual rush to be rid of them. 

 

Amy scoffed. “The fact that it looks like a porn set in here does not mean I love you. It just means we banged.”

 

Jonah seemed unphased by her denial. “Fair enough. There’s also the matter of being the only person you’ve told about your divorce. Oh, and the whole thing where you’ve been given literally all the time in the world and you apparently spend most of it talking to me,” he added causally.

 

She had told him on the ride home. She’d decided she had to, that it wouldn’t be fair to take him home, potentially take him to bed, when he was only playing with half the deck. She was worried it might have made him change his mind, but true to form he had listened, expressed disbelief, asked questions, and by the time they’d pulled into her driveway, he was a believer. 

 

She hesitated before responding, and wondered why her instinct was to disagree with him. She did love him. He loved her. Wasn’t that what she wanted? Wasn’t that the whole reason they were here?

 

“I’m sorry,” she groaned. “You’re not wrong. I don’t know. That’s just really...intimate. And I’ve never been great at that sort of thing. I never really had to be.”

 

Jonah pulled himself up on to one elbow and cocked his head, his expression mildly amused.

 

“I was inside of you like, five minutes ago, but saying ‘I love you’ is too intimate? Okay, sure.”

 

Amy shoved just hard enough for him to fall back on to his pillow. “Don’t make fun of me, I’m trying.”

 

“Would it help if I said it first? I love you. Better?” His tone was almost tauntingly light.

 

“No Jonah, not better! How do you do that?”

 

“Do what?”

 

“Just say something like that? That’s huge. That means something. You say it like it doesn’t cost you anything.”

 

He looked genuinely confused by her response. “It doesn’t.”

 

“It could though,” she insisted. “What if I don’t say it back? Or I do and everything changes between us?”

 

He sat up, ether oblivious to the fact that he was having this conversation in the nude, or simply not caring. “Well first off, jokes aside, I didn’t actually say it just to make you say it back. I said it because it’s true. It’s been true for a really long time. And it’s still going to be true even if you don’t say it back. It doesn’t come with a little asterisk denoting terms and conditions.”

 

“Thank God for that. You’re already wordier than most user agreements as it is.”

 

“See, you make fun of me and I still love you. No conditions.” He was wearing a smile that crinkled his eyes in a way that caused her to soften in the most infuriating way. “It might be a cliche, but life is short. I believe that you should love whoever is around to be loved, and you should tell them, whenever you think they need to hear it.”

 

Amy couldn't stop her eyes from rolling. “Yeah, I’m going to have to call bullshit on that first part.”

 

“Fair point,” he conceded. “In your case, time is definitely relative. But I still think it holds true. Either life is short, so you shouldn’t waste a minute of it without letting someone know how much you love them. Or it’s long, in which case don’t you want to take advantage of all the extra time you get with the people you love?”

 

“You make this curse sound like a gift.”

 

“Well it got us here.”

 

“And you don’t think we could have gotten here on our own?”

 

Jonah shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. It sucks you had to take the long way around to get here, but maybe that’s what needed to happen. The universe was tired of us wasting time, so it gave you all the time in the world to waste instead.”

 

“You know what I really find hard to swallow about that? There’s terrible shit happening all over the world, all the time. Like war and famine and nazis. Again. Somehow. But the big problem that God or whatever decided to tackle was the fact that you and I were doing the will-they/won’t-they thing for too long? He’s still bitter about Ross and Rachel so He’s taking it out on me?””

 

She groaned and fell back against the headboard. Jonah grabbed her arm and tugged gently until she relented and folded herself against him. 

 

“Do you mind if I get a little philosophical on you?” he asked.

 

“It is sort of your thing, so yeah, go for it.”

 

“If time is relative, than so is suffering. A person with a broken wrist isn’t in any less pain because someone out in the world has a broken femur. And the broken femur guy isn’t feeling any better just because someone else gets diagnosed with cancer. Famines happen, and so does crushing loneliness. War exists and so does divorce. They aren’t mutually exclusive conditions. You can choose to question why one problem should be fixed instead of a million others, or you can just be glad it got fixed at all.”

 

“So you’re convinced I’m ‘fixed’ now?” she asked, genuinely concerned with his answer.

 

Jonah smiled. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re still a mess of a person, it just happens to be a mess I’m pretty fond of. But if you’re asking whether or not I think you’re going to wake up bright and early to a beautiful Wednesday morning tomorrow then yes, I do.”

 

She believed him. She didn’t know why, as he didn’t sound any more or less sure of himself than any of the other times he’d suggested a potential solution to her problem. Maybe it was the fact that he was naked and wrapped up in her sheets when he said it this time. Not usually the sort of thing that lends credibility to an argument, but she enjoyed the sight all the same. 

 

He pressed a kiss into her forehead and she stared at his face as he pulled away and settled into the pillow next to hers. 

 

_You should say it_ , she thought to herself. _Say it now. Why not?_

 

But the words still caught in her throat. Not because she didn’t love him, but because she finally believed this would be the first, and only first time, she would get to say them to him. No do overs. It had been a long time since she’d felt the pressure of an existence with no extra lives or reloads. Since actions had distinct and unavoidable consequences. But wasn’t that what she’d wanted? Wasn’t that what she’d worked so hard to get back, a life with consequences? Living didn’t get to scare her more than dying, not anymore.

 

“Jonah,” she whispered, and his eyes pulled open. 

 

“Hm?” he mumbled, clearly fighting the urge to drift off to sleep.

 

“I just...you should know. That you were right. I do-”

 

He leaned forward and kissed her gently, cutting her words short.

 

“I know Amy,” he said, already closing his eyes again and pulling the sheet tighter around him. “You can tell me in the morning.”

 

\-----

 

And so on Wednesday, October 25th, at 8:12 AM, she did.  


End file.
